#746: Jerry Seinfeld and Maria Popova

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0:04:51 ♪ Me Tim Ferriss Show ♪
0:04:54 – Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs.
0:05:02 This is Tim Ferriss.
0:05:03 Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show,
0:05:05 where it is my job to sit down
0:05:06 with world-class performers from every field imaginable
0:05:10 to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books,
0:05:12 and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.
0:05:16 This episode is a two for one,
0:05:18 and that’s because the podcast
0:05:19 recently hit its 10th year anniversary,
0:05:22 which is insane to think about,
0:05:24 and past one billion downloads.
0:05:26 To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best,
0:05:30 some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes
0:05:33 over the last decade.
0:05:34 I could not be more excited
0:05:36 to give you these super combo episodes.
0:05:38 And internally, we’ve been calling these
0:05:40 the super combo episodes,
0:05:42 because my goal is to encourage you to, yes,
0:05:44 enjoy the household names, the super famous folks,
0:05:47 but to also introduce you to lesser-known people
0:05:49 I consider stars.
0:05:52 These are people who have transformed my life,
0:05:54 and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.
0:05:57 Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle,
0:06:00 perhaps you missed an episode.
0:06:01 Just trust me on this one,
0:06:03 we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
0:06:07 And for the bios of all guests,
0:06:09 you can find that and more at tim.blog/combo.
0:06:14 And now, with our further ado,
0:06:15 please enjoy and thank you for listening.
0:06:18 – First up, Jerry Seinfeld,
0:06:22 American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and producer,
0:06:27 and co-creator of the Emmy Golden Globe
0:06:30 and People’s Choice Award-winning, “Seinfeld,”
0:06:33 named the greatest television show of all time by TV Guide.
0:06:37 His latest book is, “Is This Anything?”
0:06:41 You can find Jerry on Twitter and Instagram @JerrySeinfeld.
0:06:45 – My writing sessions used to be very arduous,
0:06:51 very painful, pushing against the wind
0:06:55 in soft, muddy ground, like a wheelbarrow full of bricks.
0:07:00 You either learn to do that
0:07:02 or you will die in the ecosystem.
0:07:06 And I learned that really fast and really young.
0:07:09 And that saved my life and made my career,
0:07:12 that I grasped the essential principle
0:07:17 of survival in comedy really young.
0:07:23 And that principle is you learn to be a writer.
0:07:28 It’s really the profession of writing.
0:07:30 That’s what stand-up comedy is.
0:07:32 However you do it, you can do it any way you want.
0:07:35 But if you don’t learn to do it in some form,
0:07:40 you will not survive.
0:07:41 – And when you sit down, is it an empty page?
0:07:44 Is it bits and pieces that you’ve noted
0:07:47 through the week as observations that you then flesh out?
0:07:50 What is actually in front of you when you start?
0:07:52 – What’s in front of me is usually about 15 or 20 pages
0:07:57 of stuff that’s in various states of development.
0:08:03 And then there’s a smaller book
0:08:05 of just really, really random things.
0:08:10 Like when you’re on a cell phone call and the call drops
0:08:15 and then you reconnect with the person, they’ll go,
0:08:20 I don’t know what happened there.
0:08:21 As if anyone is expecting them to know anything
0:08:28 about the incredibly complex technology of a cell phone.
0:08:32 They offer this little, I don’t know if it’s an excuse
0:08:35 or an apology, they go, I don’t know what happened there.
0:08:38 So anyway, so I don’t know.
0:08:39 So that’s an example of something
0:08:41 in that my little, little tiny notebook
0:08:44 that I don’t know what to do with that,
0:08:46 but it’s just so stupid to me and funny.
0:08:49 So that to me is like an archery target 50 yards away.
0:08:54 And then I take out my bow and my arrow and I go,
0:08:58 let me see if I can hit that.
0:09:00 Let me see if I can create something that I could say
0:09:05 to a room full of humans in a nightclub
0:09:10 that will make them see what I see in that.
0:09:14 There’s something stupid and funny about that to me.
0:09:17 That’s the very, very beginning.
0:09:21 So then I’ll write something about it.
0:09:23 It’ll be, if I’m lucky, it’ll be a half a page
0:09:27 or a page on a yellow legal pad.
0:09:30 And I’ll write that.
0:09:31 And then in the session the next day,
0:09:34 if I get around to it, I will see it again
0:09:37 and I will see what I have and what I like and I don’t like.
0:09:41 And as any writer can tell you, it’s 95% rewrite.
0:09:46 So I have two phases.
0:09:47 There is the free play creative phase
0:09:51 and then there is the polish and construction phase.
0:09:56 And I love to spend an ordinate,
0:09:59 I mean, it’s not wasteful to me
0:10:01 ’cause that’s just what I like to do.
0:10:03 Amounts of time refining and perfecting every single word
0:10:07 of it until it has this pleasing flow to my ear.
0:10:12 And then it becomes something that I can’t wait to say.
0:10:16 And then we go from there to the stage with it.
0:10:19 And then from the stage, the audience will then,
0:10:23 I imagine, you know, it’s a very scientific thing to me.
0:10:26 It’s like, okay, here’s my experiment
0:10:28 and you run the experiment
0:10:30 and then the audience just dumps a bunch of data on you.
0:10:34 This is good, this is okay, this is very good,
0:10:38 this is terrible.
0:10:40 And that goes into my brain from performing it on stage.
0:10:45 And then it’s back through the rewrite process
0:10:49 and then new ideas will come.
0:10:51 And it’s just millions of different kinds of development.
0:10:54 It’s just that, so you’re just trying to get your,
0:10:57 you’re just going to that place of creating,
0:11:01 fixing, jettisoning, it’s extremely occupying,
0:11:05 it’s never boring, it’s the frustration I’m so used to
0:11:09 at this point, I don’t even notice it.
0:11:11 And it’s just work time, it’s just work time.
0:11:17 I like the way athletes talk about,
0:11:19 I gotta get my work in, did you get your work in?
0:11:23 I like that phrase.
0:11:24 One of the reasons I was looking forward
0:11:26 to doing this show with you
0:11:27 is I know that it’s something you are very interested in.
0:11:31 – The craft.
0:11:32 – Yeah, the systemization of the brain
0:11:35 and creative endeavor.
0:11:38 I really think when I’m working,
0:11:41 it’s very much like when you’re watching a picture working
0:11:44 on stage than now we’re going.
0:11:47 So that’s different.
0:11:49 So basically it’s on stage and off stage,
0:11:50 it’s the desk and then the stage.
0:11:53 And then back to the desk and then back to the stage.
0:11:56 And that’s endless.
0:11:57 My guiding rule is systemize.
0:12:00 What’s the problem?
0:12:02 The problem is like my daughter.
0:12:04 My daughter is very creative, she’s extremely bright,
0:12:07 she’s got an incredible head on her shoulders.
0:12:10 And I see myself in her at that age,
0:12:14 she’s way further advanced than I was at that age.
0:12:18 She has a creative gift.
0:12:21 So I say to her, when you have a creative gift,
0:12:23 it’s like someone just gave you a horse.
0:12:25 You have to learn how to ride it.
0:12:27 You got to learn how to ride this horse.
0:12:29 And I’ve seen people that are born by the dozens and dozens.
0:12:34 I’ve seen people that were given black stallions.
0:12:38 And if you have a black stallion, like from that movie,
0:12:41 and you’re born and they just put you on it.
0:12:44 And that’s what happens.
0:12:46 They just put you on it.
0:12:48 And you either learn to ride this thing
0:12:50 or it’s gonna kill you.
0:12:52 Then we have many, many examples of that.
0:12:55 So she’s trying to write this thing, she’s struggling.
0:12:57 I can’t write, I keep putting it off.
0:13:00 So I explained to her my basic system,
0:13:03 which you already talked about at the top of the show,
0:13:06 which is if you’re gonna write,
0:13:08 make yourself a writing session.
0:13:10 What’s the writing session?
0:13:12 I’m gonna work on this problem.
0:13:14 Well, how long are you gonna work on it?
0:13:16 Don’t just sit down with an open-ended,
0:13:18 I’m gonna work on this problem.
0:13:19 That’s a ridiculous torture to put on a human being’s head.
0:13:24 It’s like you’re gonna hire a trainer to get in shape
0:13:26 and he comes over and you go,
0:13:27 how long is the session?
0:13:29 And he goes, it’s open-ended.
0:13:30 Forget it, I’m not doing it.
0:13:32 It’s over right there.
0:13:36 You’ve got to control what your brain can take, okay?
0:13:41 So if you’re gonna exercise, God bless you.
0:13:43 And that’s the best thing in the world you can do.
0:13:46 But you gotta know when’s it gonna end?
0:13:48 When’s the workout over?
0:13:50 It’s gonna be an hour, okay.
0:13:52 Or you can’t take that, let’s do 30 minutes.
0:13:55 Okay, great, now we’re getting somewhere.
0:13:57 I can do 30.
0:13:59 I’m trying to teach my son who knows how to do
0:14:02 Transcendental Meditation how to do it.
0:14:05 I assume you know about that.
0:14:06 – I do, yeah, practice this morning.
0:14:08 – I can’t do it 15 minutes, okay, let’s do 10.
0:14:12 Let’s do 10.
0:14:13 Let’s come up with something you can do.
0:14:15 That’s where you start everything.
0:14:16 That’s how you start to build a system.
0:14:19 So my daughter, so I said to her,
0:14:21 you have to have an end time to your writing session.
0:14:25 If you’re gonna sit down at a desk with a problem
0:14:28 and do nothing else, you gotta get a reward for that.
0:14:31 And the reward is the alarm goes off and you’re done.
0:14:35 You get up and walk away and go have some cookies and milk.
0:14:39 You’re done.
0:14:40 If you have the guts and the balls to sit down and write,
0:14:43 you need a reward at the other end of that session,
0:14:47 which is stop now, pencils down.
0:14:50 So that’s the beginning of a system
0:14:53 that to me will help almost anybody learn to write,
0:14:58 which is something I kind of wanted to teach in a way.
0:15:03 I think it’s so simple.
0:15:03 I think exercise is pretty simple too,
0:15:06 but people don’t, they don’t come up
0:15:08 with good simple little systems.
0:15:11 They just try and do it.
0:15:12 And that’s to me, that’s, you’re gonna fail.
0:15:14 – The simple doesn’t mean easy in the point you made.
0:15:17 – No, no, no, not easy.
0:15:18 – So important, the incentives, right?
0:15:20 Having a reward, having a defined format.
0:15:24 How long did your daughter end up choosing
0:15:27 for her writing duration?
0:15:28 Or how long have you chosen?
0:15:29 – I told her just do an hour, that’s a lot.
0:15:32 She says I’m gonna write all day.
0:15:34 No, you’re not, nobody writes all day.
0:15:36 Shakespeare can’t write all day, it’s torture.
0:15:42 – Yeah.
0:15:43 If you taught a class on writing,
0:15:45 what other lessons might you have or resources or anything?
0:15:48 Exercises, ’cause I’m imagining that your daughter
0:15:50 could sit down, she says, all right, I have an hour.
0:15:52 And then you ask her how a writing session went.
0:15:54 And she said, well, I didn’t have any idea what to write.
0:15:56 So you’d have, I don’t know what age the students
0:15:58 would be in your course, but what else would be
0:16:00 a component of your class on writing?
0:16:03 – Well, I would teach them to learn
0:16:05 to accept your mediocrity, you know?
0:16:09 No one’s really that great.
0:16:10 You know who’s great?
0:16:11 The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it.
0:16:15 It’s a game of tonnage, you know?
0:16:18 How many hours are you gonna work per week, per month,
0:16:23 per year, you might even wanna chart that.
0:16:26 Or with your exercise, if you wanna get in shape.
0:16:29 I couldn’t get in shape.
0:16:30 I was like, I’d start out as a jogger, you know,
0:16:33 like in the 70s and I would run three miles a day.
0:16:36 And then I got older and I got married late
0:16:38 and I had young kids and I really had to get in shape.
0:16:41 And I picked up this book by Bill Phillips
0:16:44 called “Body for Life.”
0:16:46 – “Body for Life,” yeah.
0:16:47 – And it’s really, really such a system
0:16:52 for a primitive, you know, brain.
0:16:54 I do it to this day.
0:16:56 I think it’s a work of genius, this book.
0:16:59 And it really got me in shape
0:17:01 because he broke it down to here’s what we’re gonna do
0:17:05 in minute one.
0:17:06 Here’s what you’re gonna do to minute five, minute 12.
0:17:10 And this is gonna end in the 45 minutes or whatever it is.
0:17:13 And every minute I know exactly what I’m doing.
0:17:16 And that like turned the key for me.
0:17:18 And all of a sudden I was getting in shape.
0:17:21 I never had to ask what am I doing now?
0:17:23 Or what are we doing next?
0:17:25 It’s like, you gotta treat your brain
0:17:28 like a dog that you just got.
0:17:30 You got it so stupid.
0:17:33 The mind is infinite in wisdom.
0:17:36 The brain is a stupid little dog that is easily trained.
0:17:40 You gotta confuse the mind with the brain.
0:17:44 The brain is so easy to master.
0:17:47 You just have to confine it.
0:17:49 You confine it.
0:17:51 – Yeah.
0:17:52 – And it’s done through repetition and systemization.
0:17:55 – So let’s talk about feedback
0:17:57 in the experimental loop that you mentioned earlier,
0:18:01 which was desk stage, desk stage, desk stage.
0:18:04 One form of feedback would be audience feedback.
0:18:07 And I’m curious what other forms of feedback you have.
0:18:10 – Now there is no other feedback.
0:18:12 That means anything.
0:18:14 – Okay, got it.
0:18:15 – Well, I’ll tell you.
0:18:15 Here’s a little fine point of writing technique
0:18:18 that I’ll pass along to you writers out there.
0:18:21 Never talk to anyone about what you wrote that day, that day.
0:18:26 You have to wait 24 hours to ever say anything to anyone
0:18:34 about what you did.
0:18:37 Because you never wanna take away
0:18:41 that wonderful, happy feeling
0:18:45 that you did that very difficult thing
0:18:49 that you tried to do that you accomplished it.
0:18:52 You wrote, you sat down and wrote.
0:18:54 So if you say anything,
0:18:57 it’s like the same reason I don’t ever heard the thing
0:18:59 like you never tell people the name
0:19:01 you’re gonna give the baby.
0:19:03 – Sure.
0:19:04 – Until it’s born, because they’re gonna react.
0:19:06 And the reaction is gonna have a color.
0:19:08 And if you’ve decided that that’s gonna be the baby’s name,
0:19:11 you don’t wanna know what anybody else thinks.
0:19:14 So I will always wait 24 hours before I say anything
0:19:17 to anyone about what I wrote.
0:19:20 So you wanna preserve that good feeling.
0:19:22 ‘Cause let’s say you write something and you love it.
0:19:24 And then later on that day, you’re talking to someone
0:19:27 and you thought, hey, what do you think of this idea?
0:19:29 Blah, blah, blah.
0:19:30 And they don’t love it.
0:19:32 Now that day feels like, oh, I guess that was a wasted effort.
0:19:37 – Right.
0:19:38 – So you always wanna reward yourself.
0:19:40 The key to writing, to being a good writer,
0:19:43 is to treat yourself like a baby,
0:19:46 very extremely nurturing and loving,
0:19:50 and then switch over to Lou Gossett,
0:19:53 an officer and a gentleman.
0:19:54 And just be a harsh, prick, ball busting son of a bitch
0:20:01 about that is just not good enough.
0:20:03 That’s gotta come out.
0:20:05 Or it’s gotta be redone or thrown away.
0:20:08 So flipping back and forth between those two brain quadrants
0:20:13 is the key to writing.
0:20:17 When you’re writing, you wanna treat your brain
0:20:20 like a toddler.
0:20:22 It’s just all nurturing and loving and supportiveness.
0:20:27 And then when you look at it the next day,
0:20:29 you wanna be just a hard ass.
0:20:31 And you switch back and forth.
0:20:34 – There’s a quote from you in the New York Times.
0:20:36 And the quote is, “I’m not OCD, but I love routine.
0:20:39 I get less depressed with routine.”
0:20:42 Aside from the writing sessions,
0:20:44 are there any other routines for you
0:20:46 that are particularly important as scaffolding
0:20:50 or automatic behaviors?
0:20:52 – Yeah, exercise, weight training,
0:20:54 and transcendental meditation.
0:20:57 I think I could solve just about anyone’s life
0:21:01 and I don’t care what you do.
0:21:03 With weight training and transcendental meditation,
0:21:06 I think your body needs that stress, that stressor.
0:21:10 And I think it builds your resilience of the nervous system.
0:21:15 And I think transcendental meditation
0:21:17 is the absolutely ultimate work tool.
0:21:22 I think the stress reduction is great,
0:21:24 but it’s more the energy recovery
0:21:26 and the concentration fatigue solution,
0:21:31 which is of course, you know, as a standup comic,
0:21:33 I can tell you my entire life is concentration fatigue.
0:21:37 Whether it’s writing or performing,
0:21:40 my brain and my body, which is the same thing,
0:21:43 are constantly hitting the wall.
0:21:46 And if you have that in your hip pocket,
0:21:49 you’re Columbus with a compass.
0:21:50 (laughing)
0:21:54 – You’re chatting with Hugh Jackman on the podcast
0:21:56 and he’s also a, devout seems like an odd word to use
0:22:00 since it can be used quite secularly,
0:22:02 but proponent of TM.
0:22:05 How many times, what does your weekly schedule look like
0:22:08 for weight training?
0:22:09 When do you do it?
0:22:10 And do you do TM twice a day or do you?
0:22:13 – I do it at least twice a day,
0:22:15 but I will do it anytime I feel like I’m dipping.
0:22:18 – Energenically.
0:22:19 – Yeah, if I sit down and the pen doesn’t move
0:22:23 for like 20 minutes, I know I’m at a guess.
0:22:27 Why isn’t the pen moving?
0:22:28 My weight training routine is three times a week
0:22:31 for an hour a session, but I’m into that.
0:22:35 I’ve been into that, I mentioned the Bill Phillips
0:22:38 body for life, the HIIT training.
0:22:41 So it’s three times a week of weights
0:22:44 and three times a week the interval cardio training.
0:22:48 There are a lot of days where I wanna cry
0:22:50 instead of do it because it really physically hurts,
0:22:53 but I just think it’s balancing,
0:22:56 it’s very balancing to the forces inside humanity
0:23:00 that I think are just, they overwhelm us.
0:23:03 We are overwhelmed by our own power
0:23:06 and you gotta put that ox in the plow,
0:23:10 make it do this stuff that it doesn’t wanna do,
0:23:13 it just keeps it, what the hell do oxes do in the wild?
0:23:16 I can’t imagine they were happy.
0:23:18 – Checking Twitter, just developing neuroses.
0:23:23 – No, well, you know, put it in the harness.
0:23:28 I mean, I don’t know.
0:23:29 A lot of my life is, I don’t like getting depressed,
0:23:31 I get depressed a lot, I hate the feeling
0:23:34 and these routines, these very difficult routines,
0:23:39 whether it’s exercise or writing,
0:23:41 and both of them are things where it’s like, it’s brutal.
0:23:46 That’s another thing I was explaining to my daughter.
0:23:48 She’s frustrated that writing is so difficult
0:23:51 ’cause no one told her
0:23:53 that it’s the most difficult thing in the world.
0:23:57 It’s the most difficult thing in the world is to write.
0:24:01 People tell you to write like you can do it,
0:24:04 like you’re supposed to be able to do it.
0:24:05 Nobody can do it.
0:24:07 It’s impossible.
0:24:08 The greatest people in the world can’t do it.
0:24:11 So if you’re gonna do it, you should first be told
0:24:13 what you are attempting to do is incredibly difficult.
0:24:18 One of the most difficult things there is,
0:24:20 way harder than weight training, way harder.
0:24:23 What you’re summoning, trying to summon within your brain
0:24:27 and your spirit to create something onto a blank page.
0:24:32 That’s another part of my systemization technique.
0:24:36 Learn how to encourage yourself.
0:24:39 That’s why you don’t tell someone what you wrote.
0:24:42 Be proud of yourself.
0:24:43 Encourage, you know, treat yourself well
0:24:46 for having done that horrible, horribly impossible thing.
0:24:50 – I would have to imagine,
0:24:51 and maybe this is just a projection
0:24:54 because I hope that when I have kids,
0:24:56 which I don’t have yet, that this will be true for me,
0:24:58 but that being kind to your creative self
0:25:02 and offering positive reinforcement for yourself
0:25:05 through the process would affect how you parent,
0:25:07 I would have to imagine.
0:25:08 – Yes, yes.
0:25:10 Unfortunately, we seem to have lost
0:25:12 the Lugasit side of parenting.
0:25:15 (laughing)
0:25:19 – Pesky Child Protective Services.
0:25:22 What do they know?
0:25:22 (laughing)
0:25:25 – But yeah, it is similar.
0:25:26 You want to be very encouraging,
0:25:28 but you also want to explain there are laws in life
0:25:33 that you need to know about, or it’s gonna hurt.
0:25:37 I think one of the better lines I’ve come up with
0:25:40 over my life is that pain is knowledge rushing in
0:25:45 to fill a void with great speed.
0:25:48 Can you say that one more time, please?
0:25:49 – Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void.
0:25:53 You don’t know that that post of your bed
0:25:57 was not where you thought it was,
0:26:00 but when your foot hits it,
0:26:02 that knowledge is gonna come rushing in really fast,
0:26:07 it’s gonna really hurt when your foot hits that post,
0:26:11 ’cause that was a piece of knowledge
0:26:13 that you didn’t have that you’re gonna get,
0:26:16 you’re about to get.
0:26:17 – You were talking about Black Stallion
0:26:18 and learning to ride Black Stallion
0:26:20 unless you be broken yourself by your superpowers
0:26:25 slash potential murderers.
0:26:28 I’ve struggled with depression for decades
0:26:30 and have found summer spite in the last five or six years
0:26:32 for a whole host of reasons,
0:26:33 but aside from the writing and weight training,
0:26:37 is there anything else that has contributed to your ability
0:26:40 to either stave off or mitigate depressive episodes
0:26:44 or manage?
0:26:45 – No, I still got ’em, still got ’em.
0:26:49 The best thing I ever heard about it
0:26:51 was that it’s part of a kit that comes
0:26:54 with a creative aspect to the brain
0:26:58 that a tendency to depression
0:26:59 seems to always accompany that.
0:27:01 And I read that like 20 years ago
0:27:03 and that really made me happy.
0:27:06 So I realized, well, I wouldn’t have all this
0:27:08 other good stuff that that’s just comes in the kit,
0:27:12 that you have a tendency to depression,
0:27:14 but I think it’s fair to say that I don’t know a human
0:27:17 that doesn’t have the tendency.
0:27:19 – You gave me a quote.
0:27:20 I’ll ask you one more question and then we close.
0:27:22 – We can go a little more, I’m enjoying this so much.
0:27:25 Let’s go a little more.
0:27:26 – All right, let’s do it.
0:27:27 So I’d love to ask about, following up on depression,
0:27:29 I’d love to ask about failure,
0:27:31 just to keep this bright and shiny.
0:27:33 Can you think of how a particular failure
0:27:36 or apparent failure set you up for later success?
0:27:39 In other words, do you have a favorite failure of any type?
0:27:43 Something that seemed catastrophic at the time
0:27:45 that, in fact, set you up for great things later?
0:27:50 – Yeah, yeah, I have a couple really good ones.
0:27:55 And there’s another thing I try and teach the kids,
0:27:57 you know, when something horrible happens.
0:27:59 And I think of all the things I would trade,
0:28:03 if you could take your experiences
0:28:05 and ask to trade them in,
0:28:07 the last ones I would trade would be the failures.
0:28:11 Those are the most valuable ones.
0:28:14 When I moved to LA, I was only doing comedy four years,
0:28:19 but I had built up a pretty good reputation in New York.
0:28:22 And New York was really, in those days,
0:28:24 still very much the minors to LA, which was the majors.
0:28:29 So I went out to LA and people talked that I was coming
0:28:33 and that I was one of the hot guys coming out of New York.
0:28:36 And I was only doing it four years, I was 25 years old.
0:28:40 Really, it’s still just starting.
0:28:42 And the comedy store was the club in LA
0:28:45 that you had to break into, that was the club.
0:28:49 And the guys that worked there and the women were killers.
0:28:53 I mean, these people made the room just shake with laughter.
0:28:57 It was very intimidating to go on there.
0:29:01 And I went on there and I did very well.
0:29:05 You know, in those days you would call
0:29:06 and they would give you spots if you were good.
0:29:09 And I would never get spots.
0:29:10 I would get like one spot a week and, you know,
0:29:12 one spot a week is like one push-up a week.
0:29:15 It’s like, you get it, well, don’t even bother.
0:29:18 And so I asked to meet with Mitzi Shor,
0:29:20 who’s the owner of the club and the person
0:29:22 who ran the whole thing there.
0:29:24 And she said to me, she said,
0:29:26 “I’m the kind of person that needs to get stepped on.”
0:29:29 And that’s what uni, you need someone to step on you
0:29:32 and I’m gonna be that person.
0:29:36 She said, “If you called and said,
0:29:39 “if I had four spots available and you called in,
0:29:42 “I would give all four spots to this other guy.”
0:29:44 She mentioned this other guy.
0:29:46 And I sat there in her office and I nodded.
0:29:49 I nodded and I said, “Well,”
0:29:53 I won’t mention the name of the guy.
0:29:55 She said she was gonna give the four spots too.
0:29:57 I said, “Well, if maybe he can’t do all four,
0:30:02 “I’d be happy to take any of the ones he can’t do.”
0:30:05 And I walked out of there
0:30:06 and I never worked at the comedy store again.
0:30:08 And saying you’re not working at the comedy store in LA,
0:30:12 it’s like saying I wanna be a baseball player,
0:30:14 but not the majors, not the majors of the United States.
0:30:17 I’m gonna apply my trade someplace else.
0:30:23 – Lithuania.
0:30:25 – Yeah.
0:30:26 And so from there, I went from,
0:30:30 I hope it doesn’t sound them honest,
0:30:32 from being absolutely at the top of the heap
0:30:34 in New York City to playing at discos
0:30:39 in the basement in LA, you know, to like eight people.
0:30:44 But my resentment and hostility to her,
0:30:48 I was a guy who, I would say I was a three day a week guy
0:30:53 in terms of my writing discipline in those days.
0:30:57 And I went from three days a week to seven right there.
0:31:00 And I was like, okay, we’re not,
0:31:04 I was angry, I was angry, I was frustrated,
0:31:07 I was resentful, but I used that.
0:31:10 It was just fuel for me.
0:31:12 She wasn’t stopping me, nobody was gonna stop me.
0:31:15 But when someone is that hostile to you,
0:31:18 that can be a very good thing.
0:31:19 It was your top, if you’re tough enough to eat that shit
0:31:26 and say, she’s not stopping me.
0:31:28 – That’s a great story.
0:31:31 Thanks for your take.
0:31:32 One of my friends, Alexis Sohanian co-founded Reddit
0:31:35 and at one point early on, they were super excited about,
0:31:39 of course, their company, their baby,
0:31:40 they’d put all of their waking hours into it.
0:31:42 And they met with some Yahoo executive
0:31:43 who was basically just fishing for insight information.
0:31:46 And at some point in the meeting,
0:31:47 this exec said, oh, there’s your traffic.
0:31:50 Oh, that’s a rounding error for us.
0:31:52 And so Alexis and his guys took a huge,
0:31:55 they made a poster that said, you are a rounding error
0:31:58 and put it on the wall in their office.
0:32:01 – Yeah.
0:32:02 – It works, it works.
0:32:05 – We were talking about systemizing,
0:32:06 gamifying is another thing I’m very big on.
0:32:09 Let’s make this into a game, you know,
0:32:11 whatever the problem is, let’s make it a game.
0:32:14 To me, it’s a fun game.
0:32:15 I honestly, I wouldn’t say this around my family,
0:32:19 but I don’t care if I drop dead tomorrow.
0:32:21 It’s like, I just wanted to,
0:32:23 I still feel like I played the game well, you know?
0:32:26 – Yeah.
0:32:27 – That’s all I wanna feel.
0:32:28 I just wanna feel like I played the game well.
0:32:30 – What would be an example of gamifying?
0:32:32 I mean, I’ve read, of course,
0:32:34 the, about the, you know, Seinfeld’s productivity secret
0:32:37 marking the crosses on the calendar,
0:32:39 which I guess some people get.
0:32:41 – Yeah, that’s not really a game.
0:32:43 That’s more based at, I think stats are good
0:32:47 if you want to improve anything.
0:32:49 My trainer, Adam Wright, and I always like to play this game.
0:32:53 Well, this was the maximum amount of weight you did
0:32:57 three months ago for this many seconds or whatever.
0:33:01 And then it’s like, that’s, so it’s a game now.
0:33:04 Let’s see if I can keep the reps going for 30 seconds.
0:33:07 Last time was 25.
0:33:09 So it’s a little game.
0:33:10 It’s just, again, this just goes back to my,
0:33:13 the human brain is a schnauzer.
0:33:15 It’s just a stupid little contraption
0:33:18 that you can easily trick.
0:33:20 As soon as you tell me I did it 25 seconds last time,
0:33:23 okay, let’s see if I can do 30.
0:33:25 – Yeah.
0:33:26 That’s not wisdom.
0:33:27 That’s not intelligence.
0:33:29 It’s a stupid little machine.
0:33:31 It’s gonna do that every single time.
0:33:33 Every time you tell someone your last best was 25 seconds,
0:33:38 you’re gonna try for 30.
0:33:39 – When you hear the word successful,
0:33:45 who comes to mind for you and why?
0:33:48 Could be parents, could be outside of parents,
0:33:50 could be anybody.
0:33:51 But for you, when you hear that word,
0:33:53 is there anyone who is really a sort of paragon
0:33:56 of what you would consider success
0:33:57 or someone you have looked up to as someone who’s successful?
0:34:02 – Well, that’s a pretty broad term.
0:34:05 – Hyper broad.
0:34:06 It comes down to kind of how you define it also.
0:34:08 – You know, I think, I don’t know if I mean it as a joke,
0:34:11 but I say a lot these days, survival is the new success.
0:34:15 And I’m a big, look, Tim, what do you want me to tell you?
0:34:21 In my business, if you’re 60 plus or I’ll even,
0:34:26 if you’re 55 and you’re getting paid to work,
0:34:31 paid well, you have crushed it.
0:34:35 – Yeah.
0:34:35 – So stand up comedy.
0:34:38 I would move this piece of our conversation
0:34:40 next to the toxic ecosystem of this world.
0:34:45 When you have seen the attrition that I have seen,
0:34:47 it’s like in the heart of the sea.
0:34:50 You know that book?
0:34:51 – Yep.
0:34:51 – Ron Howard made the movie when they’re dropping like flies
0:34:55 and the handful, the small handful.
0:34:59 Somebody asked me the other day,
0:35:00 how many people whose careers were made on the Tonight Show
0:35:04 with Johnny Carson are still working?
0:35:07 I didn’t want to answer the question.
0:35:09 ‘Cause you had it, you know what I mean?
0:35:11 You had it, you had, you had it.
0:35:14 So once you have it, you can only lose it.
0:35:20 You know, you can only fail to take care of it.
0:35:24 And that’s when we get to health and work ethic
0:35:30 and managing yourself so that you don’t break.
0:35:35 Because they’re trying to break you.
0:35:38 I always tease my friend Jimmy Fallon
0:35:40 that this is like a sick experiment, these talk show gigs.
0:35:44 Let’s take a human being, put him in a studio
0:35:49 for decades, doing an hour of television a day
0:35:54 and let’s see what breaks.
0:35:56 It’s sick.
0:35:58 It’s a sick human experiment.
0:36:01 Like it’s like a pope job.
0:36:04 It’s like they just do it till you’re dead.
0:36:06 – The forever skinner box.
0:36:09 Oh God. – Yeah.
0:36:10 – Yeah, that’s brutal.
0:36:12 You’ve already given a bunch of possible answers to this,
0:36:15 but if you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking,
0:36:18 that could get a message, a quote, an image question,
0:36:21 anything out to billions of people,
0:36:24 what might you put on that billboard?
0:36:27 – Back in the 80s, I had a friend who was teaching
0:36:30 a comedy course at the improv on Melrose and LA.
0:36:35 And he asked me if I would come in and talk to the class.
0:36:37 And I said, sure.
0:36:39 I went in and there was like,
0:36:41 I don’t know, maybe 20 people in the class
0:36:44 in the afternoon.
0:36:46 And I went up on stage and I said,
0:36:48 the fact that you have even signed up for this class
0:36:51 is a very bad sign for what you’re trying to do.
0:36:54 The fact that you think anyone can help you
0:37:00 or there’s anything that you need to learn,
0:37:03 you have gone off on a bad track.
0:37:06 Because nobody knows anything about any of this.
0:37:12 And if you wanna do it, what I really should do
0:37:16 is I should have a giant flag behind me
0:37:21 that I would pull a string and it would roll down
0:37:24 and on it the flag would just say two words, just work.
0:37:29 (laughing)
0:37:32 – Just work.
0:37:34 – Just work.
0:37:35 – Yeah, I love it.
0:37:37 – Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors
0:37:43 and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:39:07 And now, Maria Popova, essayist, author, poet,
0:39:12 and writer of literary and arts commentary
0:39:15 and cultural criticism at The Margin Alien,
0:39:18 part of the Library of Congress’s
0:39:21 permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials.
0:39:25 You can find Maria on Instagram at MariaPopova.
0:39:29 – Hello, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferris
0:39:33 and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show.
0:39:36 I am extremely excited to have a fellow Geek and Arms,
0:39:41 Maria Popova on the line with me.
0:39:43 Maria, how are you today?
0:39:45 – Very well, thank you for having me.
0:39:46 – And I appreciate your coaching on the last name.
0:39:49 I wasn’t sure if it was Popova or Popova.
0:39:52 I have friends who, for instance,
0:39:54 Naval or Avakant, who’s a friend, it’s actually novel,
0:39:56 but Americans can’t really pull that off,
0:39:58 so he goes for Naval.
0:40:00 So I appreciate the coaching and–
0:40:03 – As a country of immigrants,
0:40:04 we have a surprisingly hard time
0:40:07 getting people’s original names right, right?
0:40:10 – Absolutely, it’s just the sort of anglicizing
0:40:14 of such a crisol, like a melting pot of different cultures.
0:40:18 And at the same time, I think it’s a reflection
0:40:20 of where I spend a lot of time, which is reading.
0:40:24 And there are so many words,
0:40:26 I’ve embarrassed myself on many occasions,
0:40:29 that I’ve read dozens or even hundreds of times,
0:40:32 especially in scientific literature,
0:40:33 that I’ve never heard pronounced.
0:40:36 – Oh yeah, I’ve called this Reader Syndrome.
0:40:38 As somebody who spends the majority
0:40:40 of her waking hours reading, you run into that a lot,
0:40:43 especially with sort of cultural icons,
0:40:47 last names, first names that are spelled differently
0:40:49 than very differently than they’re pronounced.
0:40:52 It’s kind of tragic comic when you actually find out
0:40:56 how they’re pronounced.
0:40:57 – No, exactly, or it can be a real revelation.
0:40:59 I remember when I was a young kid,
0:41:01 I couldn’t hit, let’s say, democracy or aristocracy.
0:41:06 I could only say, because I had also read it,
0:41:09 democracy, aristocracy, for whatever reason,
0:41:12 I couldn’t get the emphasis right.
0:41:13 But coming back to the reading,
0:41:15 and someone who spends most of their waking hours reading,
0:41:17 if someone asks you, and I’m sure occasionally it happens,
0:41:20 what do you do for those people listening
0:41:22 who may not be familiar with you?
0:41:24 But we’ll start with a cocktail question.
0:41:26 When someone asks you, what do you do?
0:41:28 How do you answer that?
0:41:30 – Well, I’ve answered it differently over the years,
0:41:33 in part because I think inhabiting our own identity
0:41:35 is kind of a perpetual process,
0:41:37 but right now I would say I read and I write in that order,
0:41:42 and in between I do some thinking,
0:41:45 and I think about how to live a meaningful life, basically.
0:41:50 – And if someone then were to go online,
0:41:54 find your work, end up at brain pickings,
0:41:56 and they’re like, oh, this is quite interesting,
0:41:59 and they’ve kind of looked over their shoulder
0:42:00 because they happen to be doing it
0:42:01 on their iPhone at the party,
0:42:02 and they’re like, what is brain pickings?
0:42:04 How do you typically describe that?
0:42:06 – It’s just the record of that thinking,
0:42:08 my personal subjective private thinking
0:42:11 that takes place between my reading and the writing,
0:42:14 and takes form in writing.
0:42:16 – Collection of very interesting things,
0:42:18 and sometimes how I sort of simply put it to folks,
0:42:21 and brain pickings for those people wondering
0:42:24 is one of the very few sites that I end up on constantly,
0:42:29 and when people ask me, what blogs do you read?
0:42:33 I’m embarrassed, in some cases kind of humiliated,
0:42:36 to answer that I don’t go really to many blogs consistently,
0:42:40 and I think part of the reason is so many of them
0:42:43 feel compelled to put out very, very timely
0:42:48 of-the-moment material that expires within a few hours,
0:42:51 and I don’t like the feeling of keeping up with the Joneses
0:42:56 when the Joneses are just sort of churning out content,
0:43:00 and I remember Kathy Sierra at one point told me
0:43:03 that you should focus on just in time information,
0:43:05 not just in case information,
0:43:07 which I thought was very astute and really sort of profound,
0:43:09 but there are two sites that come to mind
0:43:12 that I end up on quite a lot.
0:43:14 Brain pickings is one, and Sam Harris’s blog is another,
0:43:18 and I saw your review of his latest book, “Waking Up.”
0:43:22 – Well, not a review. – Not a review.
0:43:24 – I don’t review books either.
0:43:25 – Okay, no, so this is-
0:43:27 – An annotated reading, if you will.
0:43:29 – Okay, so an annotated reading,
0:43:31 and I definitely want to dig into that,
0:43:33 annotated reading of “Waking Up,”
0:43:35 which I found really impactful for me in a lot of ways.
0:43:38 It put words to a lot of vague sort of feelings
0:43:40 or observations that I had for a very long time.
0:43:43 Talking about reviews, I polled a number of my friends
0:43:46 and my readers about different questions
0:43:48 they would love to ask you.
0:43:49 And a close friend of mine, Chris Saka,
0:43:52 he came back with what percentage of “New York Times”
0:43:55 bestsellers can be attributed to your coverage?
0:43:58 And I’d be curious to hear you answer that,
0:44:01 and then there’s sort of a follow-up,
0:44:03 but you’ve built this incredible powerhouse
0:44:06 of an outlet for your, whether it’s creative musings
0:44:10 or observations, and it has a huge influence
0:44:14 on what people read.
0:44:16 So if you were to sort of think of that,
0:44:17 how would you answer that question?
0:44:19 – Well, first of all, you’re very pined to put it that way
0:44:22 as a stress, but I think one big caveat to all of that
0:44:27 is that the majority of books that I read and write about
0:44:31 are very old, out of print,
0:44:34 things that are not competing for “New York Times” bestseller.
0:44:36 In fact, I don’t even know if I ever really,
0:44:39 I mean, perhaps, I don’t know if the books that I read
0:44:43 have any overlap in the Venn diagram of things
0:44:45 with the “New York Times” bestsellers,
0:44:46 but I suspect that the reason Chris asked that question
0:44:49 is actually that I met him through his wife,
0:44:52 who collaborated with Wendy McNaughton,
0:44:54 the illustrator, whose work I love, and I love Wendy,
0:44:57 on a book about wine, and I wrote about it
0:45:00 because it’s lovely and sort of profound
0:45:03 and challenges our existing ideas
0:45:05 about sort of sensor experience.
0:45:07 And I like things that take something very superficial
0:45:10 and find something deeper and something unusual in it.
0:45:13 But in any case, so I wrote about that book
0:45:15 and that particular piece on “Grain Pickings”
0:45:16 seemed to do pretty well.
0:45:18 And I think perhaps that warped Chris’ idea
0:45:22 of how much contemporary books I really sort of am interested in.
0:45:27 – Right.
0:45:28 – But I would say that’s a minority.
0:45:31 – Right, and for those people wondering,
0:45:32 it’s the essential scratch and sniff guide
0:45:34 to becoming a wine expert, which was written along with,
0:45:37 and the illustrations are wonderful.
0:45:39 Richard Betz was the sommelier who was part of that.
0:45:42 And at one point I met with him
0:45:43 because I wanted to try to deconstruct the master sommelier test.
0:45:48 And he said, “I can show you how to do it.”
0:45:50 And it was just the pared down sort of hacked,
0:45:54 if you will, version still of passing the master sommelier test
0:45:57 was so intimidating that I put it on ice indefinitely.
0:46:01 But at some point, Richard, we will talk again
0:46:03 and form a game plan.
0:46:04 So the opposite, of course,
0:46:06 of sort of putting out this material that expires
0:46:09 as soon as it’s out on the vine
0:46:11 is putting out what I think you do very often.
0:46:14 And that is timely and timeless, I’ve heard you call it,
0:46:16 material where you’re pulling from old sources
0:46:20 or older sources, doing pattern recognition
0:46:23 to pull from other areas to talk about, say, a theme
0:46:27 or something that still affects people.
0:46:30 And I was doing research for this interview
0:46:33 and we met briefly in New York at an event
0:46:37 and I’ve been a longtime fan of your work.
0:46:40 And so I thought to myself like,
0:46:42 how much digging do I really need to do?
0:46:44 And good God, you have such an absolute
0:46:49 cannon of work out there.
0:46:51 It is astonishing.
0:46:53 I mean, it is really–
0:46:54 – You’re very kind.
0:46:55 It’s just the volume of time, really.
0:46:57 It’s been, I’ve been doing this for eight years
0:47:00 coming up actually exactly a month from today.
0:47:02 It’ll be eight years.
0:47:03 – Oh, really?
0:47:04 – So it’s just the accumulation, you know?
0:47:06 – And I’m fascinated by routine and schedule.
0:47:10 And I’m reading from, of course, not the always accurate
0:47:14 but generally a good place to start Wikipedia.
0:47:17 And it says that brain picking takes, you know,
0:47:19 400 plus hours of work per month,
0:47:22 hundreds of pieces of content per day,
0:47:24 12 to 15 books per week that you’re reading.
0:47:28 I know I’m asking a handful of questions
0:47:29 that you’ve been asked before,
0:47:31 but sometimes the answer is change
0:47:32 and evolve– – They always do.
0:47:34 And which is why I actually don’t do interviews
0:47:38 very frequently because I find that they sort of
0:47:41 tend to kind of cast us as the static thing
0:47:44 that just stays there some sort of reference point
0:47:47 while we’re really just the fluid process
0:47:50 and we’re constantly evolving, but in any case–
0:47:52 – No, definitely so.
0:47:53 – You’re a lot.
0:47:54 – So it’s– – The answer is routine.
0:47:55 – So the question that you’ve,
0:47:56 I’m sure been asked many times,
0:47:58 but I’ll ask again is how do you find/choose
0:48:02 the books that you read?
0:48:03 This is a huge problem for me
0:48:05 because my appetite for reading outstrips
0:48:08 the time that I have.
0:48:09 And so I end up actually, unfortunately,
0:48:11 sometimes finding myself anxious
0:48:14 because of the number of books I’ve taken on it
0:48:16 at any given point in time.
0:48:18 So I’d be curious how you sort of vet
0:48:20 the books that you read.
0:48:22 – Well, I guess it goes back to that question of,
0:48:26 well, let me backtrack and just say that I write
0:48:29 about a very wide array of disciplines
0:48:33 and eras and sensibilities
0:48:35 because that’s what I think about.
0:48:37 So anything from art and science to philosophy,
0:48:41 psychology, history, design, poetry, you name it.
0:48:46 But the common denominator for me
0:48:48 is just this very simple question of,
0:48:51 does this illuminate some aspect,
0:48:54 big or small, of that grand question
0:48:56 that I think we all tussle with every day,
0:48:58 which is how to live well,
0:48:59 how to live a good, meaningful, fulfilling life?
0:49:03 Whether that’s Aristotle’s views
0:49:05 on happiness and government
0:49:07 or beautiful art from 12th century Japan
0:49:11 or Sam Harris’s new book, anything.
0:49:14 – Got it.
0:49:16 And I’ve read you citing Kurt Vonnegut before.
0:49:20 Kurt Vonnegut’s one of my favorite writers of all time.
0:49:23 – I know, I heard your semi-colon quote just,
0:49:27 I think it was either the interview
0:49:29 with Kevin Kelly or with Sam,
0:49:30 but I actually have a counterpoint to the semi-colon.
0:49:34 – Okay, no, no.
0:49:35 – Question, but show on.
0:49:36 – So I actually brought up the semi-colon quote partially
0:49:40 as a sort of wink, wink, nod,
0:49:43 ribbing to a friend of mine named John Rominello
0:49:46 who has a tattoo of a semi-colon on his,
0:49:49 I think it’s his forearm.
0:49:50 – He’s got a love type nerd.
0:49:53 – He loves semi-colons.
0:49:54 He also has a molecule of testosterone on the other armies.
0:49:57 He’s a fascinating guy.
0:49:58 But the quote that I heard you cite
0:50:00 that I wanted to dig into a bit
0:50:03 was Kurt Vonnegut saying, “Write to please just one person.”
0:50:08 So my question to you is, when you write,
0:50:11 is that still the case?
0:50:13 And if so, who is that person that you are writing for?
0:50:17 – It is very much the case.
0:50:19 I still write for an audience of one and that’s myself.
0:50:23 It’s, like I said, it’s just selective.
0:50:26 My thought process, my way of just trying to navigate
0:50:29 my way through the world and understand my glace in it,
0:50:34 understand how we relate to one another,
0:50:36 how different pieces of the world relate to each other
0:50:39 and sort of create a pattern of meaning
0:50:42 out of seemingly unrelated meaningless information
0:50:45 and the sort of transmutation of information
0:50:48 into wisdom really, which is what learning to live is.
0:50:52 It’s about wisdom.
0:50:53 And that’s interesting too,
0:50:54 because when I started, like I said,
0:50:57 it was eight years ago,
0:50:59 it started very much as a private record of my own curiosity
0:51:02 and I shared it with seven coworkers that I had at the time,
0:51:05 just as a little sort of email newsletter thing.
0:51:08 And now to think that there are about seven million people,
0:51:11 strangers reading it every month.
0:51:13 – That’s amazing.
0:51:14 Congratulations, by the way. – It’s kind of surreal.
0:51:15 Thank you.
0:51:16 And I’m not sort of number dropping
0:51:18 for failure or anything like that,
0:51:20 but just to try to articulate how surreal it feels to me
0:51:23 that I still feel like I’m writing to one person,
0:51:25 one very sort of inward person.
0:51:29 But there’s also now the awareness
0:51:31 that there are people looking on and interpreting
0:51:35 and just relating to this pretty private act.
0:51:39 And it’s a strange thing to live with
0:51:41 and in no way a bad thing.
0:51:42 I’m not complaining about it, obviously,
0:51:45 but it’s just interesting to observe
0:51:48 how one relates to oneself
0:51:50 when being looked on by a few million people, you know?
0:51:55 – Definitely.
0:51:56 And there’s so many questions I wanna ask you.
0:51:59 We might have to do a part two at some point
0:52:01 because I know we have some time constraints,
0:52:03 but the first question would be related to that.
0:52:07 There’s so much temptation to dumb things down
0:52:10 or to go after kind of the tried and true
0:52:15 buzzfeed type headlines.
0:52:17 Do you ever contend with that temptation
0:52:20 and if so, how do you resist it?
0:52:23 And this is part of the, you know,
0:52:25 how do you respond to the expectations of the crowd
0:52:29 or the seven million people looking on?
0:52:31 And I feel this personally sometimes
0:52:33 ’cause I have a blog, it has certainly by no means
0:52:36 the number of monthly readers that you have.
0:52:38 I’m somewhere between one and two million
0:52:40 uniques a month, usually.
0:52:42 – Oh, congratulations.
0:52:43 – Thank you.
0:52:43 But even at that scale, there are times
0:52:46 when I put out something that I feel is very important,
0:52:49 but on the dense side, and then it will,
0:52:52 sometimes it takes off, but sometimes it doesn’t.
0:52:55 And there’s a lot of temptation when, for instance,
0:52:58 I know you use social media quite a bit
0:53:00 and we’ll get to that, where I look at, say,
0:53:03 the retweets of the favorites
0:53:04 on something that’s kind of dense,
0:53:06 and then I’m like, oh, God, I should just do like
0:53:08 the seven tricks so you can actually teach your cat,
0:53:10 you know, and get 500,000 retweets.
0:53:12 Is that something that ever sort of crosses your mind
0:53:16 and do you ever feel that temptation?
0:53:19 – Well, you know, it’s interesting
0:53:21 because I think anybody who thinks in public,
0:53:25 which is what writing is, which is even what art is,
0:53:27 it’s some sort of putting a piece of oneself
0:53:30 out into the world, anybody who does that,
0:53:33 struggles with this really irreconcilable kind of tug of war
0:53:38 between wanting to really stay true to one’s experience,
0:53:43 and being aware that as soon as it’s out in the world,
0:53:46 there’s this notion of the other audience.
0:53:49 And, you know, Oscar Wilde, he very memorably said
0:53:52 that a true artist takes notice, whatever, of the public
0:53:56 and that the public are to him non-existent.
0:53:59 And it’s very easy to say, especially for somebody
0:54:01 as a wild who is very prolific, very public,
0:54:04 almost performative in his public presence,
0:54:07 it’s very easy to call this out as a kind of hypocrisy
0:54:10 and say, well, you can’t possibly not care about the audience
0:54:13 given you make your living through it
0:54:15 and sort of perform to it, right?
0:54:17 I think that’s a pretty cynical interpretation.
0:54:20 I think rather than hypocrisy,
0:54:21 it’s just this very human struggle to be seen
0:54:25 and to be understood, which is why all art comes to be,
0:54:30 because one human being wants to put something in it
0:54:33 to the world and to be understood
0:54:34 for what he or she stands for and who he or she is.
0:54:37 And so with that lens, I do think it’s hard to say,
0:54:41 well, you know, I don’t care about what happens to it,
0:54:44 out there, even though I write for myself
0:54:47 and think for myself,
0:54:48 the awareness of the other really does change things.
0:54:52 But I think perhaps Werner Herzog put it best.
0:54:57 I just finished reading this kind of 600-page interview
0:55:01 with him, essentially.
0:55:02 It’s a conversation that a journalist named Paul Krünen had
0:55:05 with him over the course of 30 years.
0:55:06 And in one passage, Herzog says something like, you know,
0:55:10 it’s always been important for me to have my films reach
0:55:14 an audience.
0:55:15 I don’t necessarily need to hear what those audience
0:55:19 reactions are just as long as they’re out there,
0:55:21 that they’re touching,
0:55:22 that the films are touching people in some ways.
0:55:24 And I feel very similarly.
0:55:26 So with that in mind, I guess,
0:55:29 to answer your question rather circuitously,
0:55:32 I don’t feel, quote-unquote, tempted to make listicles
0:55:36 or to make anything that I feel compromises mine
0:55:40 my experience of what I stand for.
0:55:43 And in part, I think the beauty of the web
0:55:46 is that it’s a self-perfecting organism.
0:55:49 But for as long as it’s an ad-supported medium,
0:55:53 the motive will be to perfect the commercial interest.
0:55:56 So perfect the art of the Buzzfeed listicle,
0:55:59 the endless slideshow, the infinitely paginated article,
0:56:02 and not to perfect the human spirit
0:56:05 of the reader or the writer,
0:56:07 which is really what I’m interested in.
0:56:10 I think it’s a very virtuous goal.
0:56:13 I really admire your site and obviously the newsletter
0:56:17 and all these other aspects of it for a lot of reasons.
0:56:21 One of them is I feel a very kindred spirit
0:56:25 with a lot of the decisions it seems you have made.
0:56:27 So for instance, I mean, not doing the slideshows
0:56:30 to rack up page views for some type of CPM advertising.
0:56:33 That stuff drives me insane.
0:56:35 So if it drives me insane,
0:56:36 and I assume it drives my readers insane,
0:56:38 so I’m not going to do it, or like you said.
0:56:40 – That’s so wonderful that you do that
0:56:42 because I think so much of the cultural crap
0:56:46 that is out there, not just on the internet,
0:56:47 just in general, comes from people who fail to understand
0:56:50 that they should be making the kind of stuff
0:56:52 they want to exist.
0:56:54 So if you’re a writer, write the things you wanna read.
0:56:56 If you’re an artist, paint the polls you wanna see painted.
0:56:58 And I think the commercial aspect is really warping that.
0:57:02 And one thing I really admire about your work
0:57:05 in all of its permutations from your books to this podcast,
0:57:08 the site, everything is that there’s just this sort of sense
0:57:11 that you just want this to exist.
0:57:14 It doesn’t exist for any other reason
0:57:16 than you wanted to exist.
0:57:17 And I think that’s wonderful.
0:57:19 – Thank you, that means a lot to me.
0:57:21 And coming back to the right to please just one person,
0:57:25 I think that it’s related to that.
0:57:27 So in a way, it’s put the things out into the world
0:57:29 that you would want to consume yourself
0:57:32 or experience yourself, number one.
0:57:34 Secondly, just for those people
0:57:35 who haven’t heard this anecdote,
0:57:37 when I was writing the four hour work week as my first book,
0:57:39 I still to this day find writing very challenging.
0:57:43 And I wish I could say it’s gotten easier over time,
0:57:45 but for whatever reason, it seems not to have.
0:57:49 In the case of the four hour work week,
0:57:50 I came out of undergrad at Princeton
0:57:52 and it was many years of past, obviously.
0:57:54 But when I wrote the first few chapters,
0:57:56 it was really stilted in pompous and kind of Ivy League,
0:57:59 you know, where I was trying to use $10 words,
0:58:02 where a 10 cent word would suffice and be a lot cleaner.
0:58:05 So I threw out the first few chapters that I drafted
0:58:08 and this was a major panic attack moment.
0:58:10 It was on deadline.
0:58:11 And I remember I was in Argentina at the time
0:58:14 and then I went the other way and I said,
0:58:16 “No, no, no, I have to be loose, I have to be funny.”
0:58:18 And so I wrote a few chapters
0:58:20 that were completely slapstick ridiculous.
0:58:23 I mean, they sounded like three stooges put on paper.
0:58:26 And so I had to throw out those few chapters.
0:58:30 And of course, I’m doubling down on my anxiety at this point
0:58:33 and decided at one point that I was just going to have
0:58:36 a little bit of yerba mate tea, two glasses of wine
0:58:38 and no more than two glasses of Malbec
0:58:40 and sit down and start to write.
0:58:42 – What is that?
0:58:43 – Malbec is just this wonderful varietal in South America,
0:58:48 best known in Argentina,
0:58:49 but they’re actually some really nice Malbec wines in Chile.
0:58:53 As I understand it,
0:58:54 it was viewed almost as a garbage grape in Europe,
0:58:57 but it was brought by the Italians to Buenos Aires
0:59:01 and has developed this worldwide fame
0:59:04 because of its cultivation in Argentina.
0:59:06 So there’s a lot of metaphor there that I also like,
0:59:08 but drank two glasses of wine, sat down
0:59:11 and literally opened up an email client
0:59:14 and started typing the four hour work week
0:59:17 as if I were writing it to two of my closest friends.
0:59:19 One was an investment banker trapped in his own job
0:59:23 and he felt like he couldn’t leave
0:59:24 because his lifestyle was swelling to meet his income.
0:59:27 And then the other was an entrepreneur
0:59:29 trapped in a company of his own making.
0:59:31 And so these two very specific guys in mind,
0:59:34 I started to write with just enough alcohol
0:59:36 to sort of take the edge off.
0:59:38 And that’s how I was writing in that case
0:59:40 to please just two people,
0:59:41 but that’s the only way I could make it work.
0:59:44 Your schedule, I’ve read of your schedule,
0:59:48 but I’d love to hear the current iteration of that.
0:59:52 It seems like you’ve had a fairly,
0:59:54 you have a fairly regimented schedule,
0:59:56 which would make sense if you were putting the number
0:59:58 of hours into reading and writing that you do.
1:00:01 So what does your current day look like?
1:00:03 – Well, I’ll answer this with a caveat.
1:00:05 The one thing I have struggled with
1:00:08 or tried to solve for myself in the last few years,
1:00:11 couple of years maybe is this sort of really delicate balance
1:00:15 between productivity and presence
1:00:17 and especially in a culture that seems to measure
1:00:22 or worse or marriage or our value
1:00:26 through our efficiency and our earnings
1:00:28 and our ability to perform certain tasks
1:00:31 as opposed to just the fulfillment we feel
1:00:35 in our own lives and the presence that we take
1:00:38 in the day to day.
1:00:39 And that’s something that became more and more apparent to me.
1:00:41 So I’m a little bit reluctant to discuss routine
1:00:46 as some sort of holy grail and creative process
1:00:49 because it’s just really, it’s a crutch.
1:00:52 I mean, routines and rituals help us not feel
1:00:55 like this overwhelming mesh initiative
1:00:58 just day to day life with consumers.
1:00:59 It’s a control mechanism, but that’s not all there is.
1:01:03 And if anything, it should be in the service
1:01:05 of something greater,
1:01:06 which is being present with one’s own life.
1:01:09 So without in mind, my day is very predictable.
1:01:13 I get up in the morning,
1:01:14 I meditate for between 15 to 25 minutes
1:01:17 before I do anything else.
1:01:19 – What time do you wake up?
1:01:20 Typically?
1:01:21 – Exactly eight hours after I’ve gone to bed.
1:01:24 So it varies.
1:01:26 I’m a huge proponent of sleep.
1:01:29 I think when I write because what,
1:01:32 or when I, I guess try to think,
1:01:34 what I do is essentially make associations
1:01:36 between seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts.
1:01:40 And in order for that to happen,
1:01:42 those associative chains need to be firing.
1:01:45 And when I am sleep deprived,
1:01:46 I feel like I don’t have full access to my own brain,
1:01:49 which is certainly I’m not unique in that in any way.
1:01:52 There’s research showing that our reflexes
1:01:54 are severely hindered by lack of sleep.
1:01:57 We’re almost as drunk if we sleep less
1:01:59 than half the amount of time
1:02:00 we normally need to function.
1:02:02 And I think ours is a culture where we wear our ability
1:02:06 to get by in very little sleep
1:02:07 as a kind of badge of honor that the speaks work ethic
1:02:10 or toughness or whatever it is,
1:02:12 but really it’s a total profound failure
1:02:15 of priorities and of self-respect.
1:02:18 And I try to sort of enact that in my own light
1:02:22 by being very disciplined about my sleep,
1:02:25 at least as disciplined as I am about my work
1:02:27 ’cause the latter is a product of the capacities
1:02:30 cultivated by the former.
1:02:32 So in any case, so I get up eight hours
1:02:34 after I have gone to bed.
1:02:36 I meditate, I go to the gym
1:02:38 where I do most of my longer form reading.
1:02:42 I get back home, I have breakfast and I start writing.
1:02:45 I usually write between two and three articles a day
1:02:48 and one of them tends to be longer
1:02:51 and when I write, I need uninterrupted time.
1:02:54 So I try to get the longer one done earlier on in the day
1:02:59 when I feel much more alert.
1:03:01 So I don’t look at email or anything really external
1:03:06 to the material I’m dealing with,
1:03:09 which does require quite a bit of research usually.
1:03:11 So it’s not like I can cut myself off
1:03:13 from the internet or from other books,
1:03:15 but I don’t have people disruptions, I guess.
1:03:18 So anything social.
1:03:20 And then I take a short break.
1:03:23 I’m a believer in sort of pacing,
1:03:25 creating a sort of rhythm
1:03:26 where you do very intense focused work
1:03:28 for an extended period and then you take a short break
1:03:30 and then cycle back, you know?
1:03:32 And then I deal with any sort of admin stuff
1:03:37 like emails and just taking care of errands and whatnot.
1:03:40 And I resume writing and I write my other article
1:03:45 articles through the evening.
1:03:48 I try to have some private time just later in the day,
1:03:52 either with friends or with my partner
1:03:54 or just time that is unburdened by deliberate thought,
1:03:59 although you can never unburden yourself
1:04:01 from thought in general.
1:04:03 And then usually later at night,
1:04:05 I either do some more reading or some more writing
1:04:08 or a combination of the two.
1:04:09 – Got it.
1:04:10 So a number of follow up questions.
1:04:12 What type of meditation do you practice currently?
1:04:15 – Just guided vipassana, very, very basic.
1:04:20 There’s a woman named Tara Brock
1:04:23 who she’s a mindfulness practitioner.
1:04:25 – How do you spell her last name?
1:04:27 – B-R-A-C-H.
1:04:28 – Got it.
1:04:30 – And she’s based out of DC
1:04:31 and she was trained as a cognitive psychologist
1:04:34 then did decades of Buddhist training
1:04:37 and lived in an ashram.
1:04:38 And now she teaches mindfulness
1:04:40 with a very secular lens.
1:04:42 So she records her classes and she has a podcast
1:04:45 which is how I came to know her.
1:04:48 And every week she does a one hour lecture
1:04:50 and sort of the philosophies
1:04:52 and cognitive, behavioral wisdom of the ages.
1:04:56 And then she does a guided meditation.
1:04:59 I use her meditation years
1:05:00 and she has changed my life perhaps more profoundly
1:05:03 than anybody in my life.
1:05:06 So I highly recommend her.
1:05:09 – Tara Brock.
1:05:10 – Brock, yes.
1:05:12 And all her podcasts is free.
1:05:14 She has two books out too.
1:05:16 She’s really wonderful, very generous person.
1:05:19 – I will have to check that out.
1:05:20 And so you’re listening, then you have earbuds in,
1:05:23 you’re listening to audio while you meditate.
1:05:25 – Yes, and it’s interestingly,
1:05:27 I mean, she puts one out every week
1:05:29 but I’ve been using the exact same one
1:05:31 from the summer of 2010.
1:05:33 It’s just one that I like and feel familiar with
1:05:36 and it sort of helps me get into the rhythm.
1:05:38 So every day I listen to the exact same one.
1:05:40 – Summer 2010, how would people recognize it?
1:05:42 How does the audio…
1:05:44 – I think the title is, it sounds cheesy
1:05:46 but it is not cheesy.
1:05:47 I think it’s called Smile Meditation.
1:05:50 And I’m sure she has repeated it in various forms
1:05:53 through the years and other recordings.
1:05:55 It just happens to be the one that I have on
1:05:57 and on my broken 3G iPhone
1:06:00 without any internet or cell service,
1:06:02 which I just use as an iPod, that’s on it.
1:06:05 – Awesome, that’s a great answer.
1:06:07 I love digging into the specifics.
1:06:08 So when you go to the gym then to work out,
1:06:12 are you still using an elliptical for that
1:06:15 or are you are?
1:06:17 – I do sprints, high intensity intervals on the elliptical
1:06:21 and I do a lot of weight and body weights to have too.
1:06:25 – You do, all right.
1:06:26 But when you’re reading, is that on the elliptical?
1:06:29 – Yes.
1:06:30 – And what type of device, if any,
1:06:34 are you using for that reading?
1:06:36 – Well, I prefer electronic.
1:06:38 So I use the Kindle app on the iPad or any PDM viewer
1:06:42 ’cause I read a lot of archival stuff.
1:06:44 But the challenge, of course, is that because I read
1:06:47 so many older books that are out of print,
1:06:50 let alone having digital versions,
1:06:52 that’s not always possible.
1:06:54 In case it’s rarely possible.
1:06:56 And like I’m writing about something fairly new.
1:06:59 And so in that case, I just go there with my big tone
1:07:02 and my sticky notes and pens and sharpies
1:07:05 and various annotation analog devices.
1:07:09 And I just do that.
1:07:11 – Cool, all right.
1:07:11 So that leads perfectly into the next question,
1:07:14 which is what does your note taking system look like?
1:07:16 And how do you take notes?
1:07:18 So for instance, you’re really good at using excerpts
1:07:23 or quotations, pull quotes.
1:07:25 And I found myself asking as I was reading this,
1:07:28 like how are you gathering all of this
1:07:30 so that you can use it later?
1:07:32 So what does your note taking system look like
1:07:35 in the case of digital and in the case of hard copy?
1:07:38 – So with digital, it’s very simple.
1:07:40 I just highlight passages and I write myself little notes
1:07:44 underneath each that have acronyms that I use frequently
1:07:48 for certain topics or shorthand
1:07:50 that I have developed for myself.
1:07:52 Understanding really, which is what reading
1:07:55 should be a conduit to is a form of pattern recognition.
1:07:58 So when you read a whole book,
1:08:00 you kind of walk away with certain takeaway
1:08:02 that are thematically linked
1:08:03 and it don’t usually occur sequentially.
1:08:06 So it’s not like you walk away
1:08:08 with one insight from the first chapter,
1:08:09 one insight from the second chapter.
1:08:11 It’s just sort of this pattern of the writer’s thoughts
1:08:14 that permeate the entire narrative of the book.
1:08:17 And so especially if you read as a writer,
1:08:20 so somebody who not only needs to walk away with that,
1:08:23 but ideally wants to record what those patterns
1:08:26 and themes are, that sort of reading is very different.
1:08:29 So what I end up doing with analog books in particular,
1:08:33 and that sort of hacks and systems
1:08:35 of doing it electrically, but they’re imperfect,
1:08:37 is on the very last page of each book,
1:08:40 which is blank usually right before the end cover,
1:08:44 I create an alternate index.
1:08:47 So I basically list out as I’m reading the topics
1:08:51 and ideas that seem to be important
1:08:53 and recurring in that volume.
1:08:56 And then next to each of them,
1:08:57 I start listing out the page numbers where they occur.
1:08:59 And on those pages, I’ve obviously highlighted
1:09:02 the respective passage and have a little sort of sticky tab
1:09:04 on the side so I can find it.
1:09:06 But it’s an index based not on keywords,
1:09:10 which is what a standard book index is based on,
1:09:13 but based on key ideas.
1:09:15 And I use that then to sort of synthesize
1:09:19 what those ideas are once I’m ready to write about the book.
1:09:22 – Okay, I have to geek out on this
1:09:24 ’cause I’m so excited now.
1:09:25 As it turns out, with analog books,
1:09:27 I do exactly, literally exactly the same thing.
1:09:30 I usually start with the front inside cover,
1:09:32 but I create my own index.
1:09:34 And of course, they don’t have to be in order.
1:09:36 So you can sort of list them in any,
1:09:38 in my particular case, in any order.
1:09:40 I also will have sort of a couple of lines dedicated
1:09:45 to pH and pH just refers to phrasing.
1:09:47 So if I find a turn of phrase or wording that I find really–
1:09:50 – Oh, I do that too.
1:09:52 – Oh, really?
1:09:53 – But I would BL for beautiful language.
1:09:55 – Oh, that’s so cool, okay.
1:09:58 So there’s that.
1:09:59 And then I have Q or if they’re quotes.
1:10:02 So for instance, many books will have quotes attributed
1:10:06 to other people or just header quotes in some cases.
1:10:09 And so I’ll have quotes, I’ll just write that out.
1:10:11 And then colon and then I’ll list all the page numbers
1:10:13 for that particular sort of category
1:10:17 that I’m collecting in the case of quotes.
1:10:19 When you’re gathering this, you mentioned acronyms
1:10:22 and shorthand.
1:10:23 So besides beautiful language,
1:10:24 what are some of the other acronyms that you use?
1:10:27 – Oh, they wouldn’t make sense.
1:10:29 They’re just very private.
1:10:30 It’s like too long to get into what they stand for.
1:10:33 They’re just completely my own system.
1:10:35 – Is there one other example
1:10:36 that you just, if you can indulge me?
1:10:39 – One that is, I guess, not so much about the contents
1:10:43 of that passage is about its purpose is LJ,
1:10:46 which is I have a little sort of labor of love side project
1:10:50 called Liter and Jude Box, right?
1:10:52 – Sure, I’ve seen it.
1:10:53 It’s, yeah, it’s awesome.
1:10:55 – Oh, thank you.
1:10:56 But yeah, so I do these tearing the passages
1:10:58 in literature with a thematically matched song.
1:11:01 And so sometimes as I’m reading a book,
1:11:04 I would come across a passage that I think would be great
1:11:07 for that and maybe a song comes to mind.
1:11:09 And so I would put LJ next to it.
1:11:11 But I want to go back to what you said
1:11:13 about the external quotes, I guess,
1:11:15 the author quoting another work.
1:11:18 I think those are actually really important
1:11:20 and that goes back to your question
1:11:22 about how I find what to read.
1:11:25 And I mark those types of things.
1:11:28 So for the annotations that are specific
1:11:30 to that particular book, all of my sticky tab notes
1:11:34 are on the side of the pages.
1:11:37 But when there’s an external quote,
1:11:39 something referencing another work,
1:11:41 I put a tab at the very top with the letter F,
1:11:44 which stands for find, if I am not familiar with the work,
1:11:47 or just no letter, if I just want to flag a quote
1:11:49 or something else that I know of.
1:11:52 And I think that’s actually very important
1:11:53 because the phenomenon itself, not my annotations of it,
1:11:58 because literature is really, and I say this all the time,
1:12:00 it is the original internet.
1:12:02 So all of those references and citations
1:12:06 and allusions even, they’re essentially hyperlinks
1:12:10 that that author placed to another work.
1:12:13 And that way, if you follow those,
1:12:16 you go into this magnificent rabbit hole
1:12:19 where you start out with something
1:12:21 that you’re already enjoying and liking,
1:12:23 but follow these tangential references to other works
1:12:27 that perhaps you would not have come across that way,
1:12:30 I mean, directly.
1:12:31 And in a way, it’s a way to push oneself
1:12:34 out of the filter bubble in a very incremental way.
1:12:38 And I’ve often found amazing older books
1:12:41 that were five or six hyperlink references removed
1:12:45 from something I was reading,
1:12:47 which led me to something else,
1:12:48 which led me to this great other thing.
1:12:50 So I think that’s kind of a beautiful practice.
1:12:53 – The serendipity of it is so beautiful when it works out
1:12:58 and I’ll give a confession.
1:13:00 This is really embarrassing,
1:13:01 but you know, since no one’s listening,
1:13:03 I came across Seneca, so Seneca the Younger,
1:13:08 who’s had probably more impact on my life
1:13:11 than any other writer.
1:13:13 Originally because I was perusing a number of anthologies
1:13:18 on minimalism and simplicity.
1:13:20 And Seneca kept on popping up, quote, Seneca, quote, Seneca.
1:13:24 And because it was always one word, like Madonna,
1:13:27 or, and this is going to be really embarrassing,
1:13:30 or like Sitting Bull,
1:13:31 I assumed that Seneca was a Native American elder
1:13:35 of some type for probably a good–
1:13:37 – You’re so lovely, actually.
1:13:39 – I assumed he was a Native American elder
1:13:41 for probably a good year or two
1:13:43 before I realized he was a Roman.
1:13:46 I was like, man, Ferris, you gotta do your homework, pal.
1:13:49 Like, you gotta dig in.
1:13:51 And then at that point is when I really sort of jumped off
1:13:54 the cliff into a lot of his writings,
1:13:57 which I still to this day revisit on an almost–
1:14:00 – I just revisited the shortness of life.
1:14:03 – Oh, so good, so good.
1:14:05 – Well, it was perhaps the best manifesto,
1:14:07 and I had hated this modern word sort of buzzword,
1:14:11 but I use it intentionally.
1:14:12 So the best manifesto for our current struggle
1:14:16 with this very notion of productivity versus presence
1:14:19 and how much are we really mistaking
1:14:22 the doings for the being,
1:14:24 it’s amazing that somebody wrote this millennia ago
1:14:27 before there was internet,
1:14:29 before there was the things we call distractions today,
1:14:32 and yet he writes about the exact same things
1:14:35 just in a different form, yeah.
1:14:38 – The exact same things.
1:14:39 And the way that if I’m trying to use Seneca
1:14:41 as a gateway drug into philosophy,
1:14:43 I won’t use the P word, first of all,
1:14:45 with most people ’cause philosophy,
1:14:47 I think it calls to mind for a lot of people,
1:14:49 the haughty pompous college student
1:14:52 in Goodwill Hunting in the bar scene,
1:14:55 who’s like reciting Shakespeare
1:14:57 without giving any type of credit.
1:14:59 – Yeah, I completely disagree.
1:15:01 I agree with the notion that those are connotations today
1:15:04 and people have a resistance,
1:15:05 but I think that’s all the more reason to use it heavily
1:15:09 and to use it intelligently and to reclaim it
1:15:11 and to get people to understand that philosophy,
1:15:14 whatever form it takes,
1:15:15 is the only way to figure out how to live.
1:15:18 The other thing else that we take away from anything
1:15:20 is a set of philosophies, essentially.
1:15:24 – I agree, no, I totally agree.
1:15:26 But I usually, if I’m gonna lead people there,
1:15:29 I try to lure them in with Seneca
1:15:33 because I think he’s very easy to read
1:15:35 compared to a lot of, say, at least the Stoics,
1:15:38 or that’s actually not even fair,
1:15:39 compared to a lot of philosophers
1:15:41 who have been translated from Greek,
1:15:43 most of his writing, I believe, is translated from Latin,
1:15:45 which tends to be just an easier jump from English.
1:15:48 So it’s very easy to read.
1:15:49 And what I tell people is,
1:15:51 start off with some of his letters
1:15:53 and you’ll find that you could just as easily replace
1:15:56 these Roman names, like Lucilius,
1:15:58 and so on with Bob and Jane,
1:16:01 or pick your contemporary name of choice,
1:16:05 and they’re all as relevant now as they were then.
1:16:08 I’m gonna come back to the performance versus presence,
1:16:11 which I think of oftentimes as the achievement
1:16:15 versus appreciation, split or balance,
1:16:18 or maybe neither.
1:16:19 But before we get there,
1:16:21 I want to put a bow on the note taking
1:16:24 with your electronic note taking.
1:16:26 So you’re using the Kindle app, you’re taking highlights.
1:16:29 Where do you go from there?
1:16:30 What does the sort of workflow look like from there?
1:16:33 And are there any particular types of software
1:16:35 or apps or anything like that that you use often?
1:16:39 – Honestly, I feel like that problem
1:16:41 has not been solved at all in any kind of practical way.
1:16:44 So the way that I do it is basically a bunch of hacks
1:16:47 using existing technologies.
1:16:49 But I don’t think, or perhaps I’m just unaware,
1:16:52 but I don’t think there’s anybody designing tools today
1:16:57 for people who could do serious heavy reading.
1:17:00 There just isn’t anything that I know.
1:17:01 And so what I do is I highlight in the Kindle app
1:17:04 of the iPad, and then Amazon has this function
1:17:07 that you can basically see your Kindle notes
1:17:11 and highlights on the desktop, on your computer.
1:17:14 I go to those, I copy them from that page,
1:17:18 and I paste them into an Evernote file
1:17:20 to sort of just have all of my notes
1:17:22 in a specific book in one place.
1:17:24 But sometimes I would also take a screen grab
1:17:27 of a specific iPad Kindle app,
1:17:31 Kindle page with my highlighted passage,
1:17:34 and then email that screen grab into my Evernote email
1:17:38 because Evernote has, as you know,
1:17:40 optical character recognition.
1:17:41 So when I search within it,
1:17:44 it’s also gonna search the text in that image.
1:17:47 I don’t have to wait until I finish the book
1:17:48 and explore all my notes.
1:17:49 And also the formatting is kind of shitty
1:17:53 on the Kindle notes on the desktop
1:17:56 where you can see all your notes.
1:17:57 So if you copy them, they paste into Evernote
1:18:00 with this really weird formatting.
1:18:02 So it tabulates each next notes indented to the right.
1:18:07 So it’s sort of this long cascading thing
1:18:09 that shifts more and more to the right.
1:18:11 – Oh, that’s horrible.
1:18:12 It’s like an email thread.
1:18:14 – It’s like an email thread,
1:18:15 except there’s no actual hierarchy.
1:18:17 These are all, you know,
1:18:18 and so if you wanna go fix it,
1:18:19 you have to do it manually within Evernote.
1:18:22 And you know, on the Werner Herzog book, for example,
1:18:25 which is 600 pages, I have thousand of notes.
1:18:28 So imagine thousands of tabulations
1:18:30 until the last one is so narrow and long
1:18:33 that it’s just like unreadable.
1:18:35 So hence my point about just,
1:18:37 there is no viable solution that I know.
1:18:41 – Got it.
1:18:42 Okay, so let me, this may or may not help.
1:18:44 For me, it was a huge shift in how I manage Evernote.
1:18:49 ‘Cause I mean, I’m looking at this list of questions
1:18:52 and I’m not reading entirely on script,
1:18:54 but I have a collection of questions in Evernote right now.
1:18:57 And one of the things I realized about formatting
1:19:00 and transposing things from say, you know,
1:19:03 my Kindle page, if you log into your Amazon account
1:19:06 through Kindle.Amazon.com
1:19:07 or copying and pasting from many different places
1:19:11 is going to, I don’t know if you’ve tried this,
1:19:13 but edit and either paste and match style
1:19:16 or paste as plain text.
1:19:17 And it tends to remove all of that headache.
1:19:21 Let’s see nine times out of 10.
1:19:22 – The problem with that, I did try that once,
1:19:25 but when you remove the style,
1:19:27 it makes all the metadata look the same as the text.
1:19:30 So on every highlighted passage,
1:19:32 I also have my own note.
1:19:33 – I see, got it.
1:19:34 – Plus, you know, Amazon’s own thing that says,
1:19:37 add note, read, read in this location, delete note.
1:19:41 And so it all merges in and becomes just hideous.
1:19:43 They’re just embossed with me.
1:19:44 – God, you know, I wonder, I wonder what to do there.
1:19:47 Yeah, I used to take notes and drop them into text Wrangler,
1:19:51 which is used for coding a lot,
1:19:52 just to remove the formatting
1:19:53 and then put it into Evernote.
1:19:55 – Yeah, I do that with Kota.
1:19:56 – Yeah, it’s true though.
1:19:59 – But there’s got to be a solution.
1:20:00 And the thing is, Evernote, I love Evernote.
1:20:03 I’ve been using it for many years
1:20:04 and I could probably not get through my day without it,
1:20:07 but it has an API, which means somebody can build this,
1:20:10 you know, and there’s a way to like,
1:20:12 I even thought, I mean, I was at one point so desperate
1:20:15 and so frustrated, which I think is the duo
1:20:17 that causes all innovation, you know,
1:20:19 desperation and frustration.
1:20:21 – I thought maybe I should just save up some money
1:20:24 and offer like a scholarship or like a grant for a hackathon
1:20:28 for somebody to solve this for me, you know?
1:20:31 – That’s a great idea.
1:20:32 – I mean, I’m still sort of contemplating that.
1:20:36 – Okay, well, we’ll talk about that separately.
1:20:38 I think that’s something that we could absolutely explore.
1:20:40 And for all of you, programmers, coders out there,
1:20:43 please take a look.
1:20:44 This is actually not as rare an issue as you might expect.
1:20:47 One question for you on the Kindle highlights.
1:20:50 I’ve run into this.
1:20:51 You mentioned the Werner Herzog book
1:20:53 and having, you know, thousands of highlights.
1:20:56 Have you run into instances where
1:20:59 you’ll read an entire book, you’re super impressed or not,
1:21:02 but regardless, you have hundreds of highlights
1:21:05 and you go to look at those highlights
1:21:07 and you’re restricted to only seeing the first.
1:21:10 – Oh yeah, it says like 200 highlights, 81 available.
1:21:15 Or something like that.
1:21:15 – Right, so how often does that happen to you?
1:21:17 Because that’s happened to me
1:21:19 where I’ve taken so much time to meticulously highlight stuff
1:21:22 and then I’m only able to see 25% and it’s so infuriating.
1:21:26 And I think it’s a limitation
1:21:27 that is determined by the publisher.
1:21:29 – Yes, it is.
1:21:30 And so I’ll tell you why it hasn’t happened to me much.
1:21:33 It happens to me occasionally, but that’s a DRM thing,
1:21:36 digital for listeners who don’t like acronyms,
1:21:39 digital rights management thing that is fairly new.
1:21:43 So that is the case with more recently published books.
1:21:47 But if you read the digitized version of say Alan Watts
1:21:51 that was published originally 40 years ago,
1:21:54 there’s no such problem unless the publisher now
1:21:57 is like reclaiming rights and doing a whole new thing.
1:22:00 But because I read so much less
1:22:05 out of sort of newly published material,
1:22:07 I don’t run into it often.
1:22:08 But there is a way to very laboriously deal with it
1:22:13 which is you can still open that passage
1:22:16 in your Kindle app on desktop, so Kindle for Mac for me.
1:22:21 And it will let you highlight and copy those passages
1:22:25 to paste them into your Evernote
1:22:27 and between the myth and courts,
1:22:28 but it’s obviously completely not conducive.
1:22:30 – I have done that.
1:22:31 And it’s so horrible because you also get the like excerpted
1:22:35 from three lines for everyone.
1:22:38 So it just publishers, if you’re listening to this,
1:22:41 do you are making it harder for people like Maria
1:22:44 who have seven million uniques per month
1:22:47 to share your stuff?
1:22:50 So please up your threshold.
1:22:52 Do you have anybody helping you with brain pickings
1:22:55 or is it just you?
1:22:57 – The actual reading and writing obviously is just me.
1:23:00 But as of about 10 months ago,
1:23:03 I have an assistant Lisa who’s actually wonderful
1:23:06 and she just helps me with admin docs
1:23:09 that has to do with my travel or email
1:23:12 or scheduling things that I feel is weighing me down so much.
1:23:17 I operate so much out of a sense of guilt
1:23:21 for sort of letting people down or, and as you know,
1:23:25 I’m sure when you get to a point where the demands
1:23:28 are just incomparable with what you can even look at,
1:23:33 then you kind of need to have help
1:23:35 in order not to either go insane
1:23:37 or live with a constant guilt over not addressing things.
1:23:41 Oh, and I also have a copy editor,
1:23:43 this wonderful older lady I hired to do my proofreading.
1:23:47 She’s great.
1:23:48 That’s all I can say.
1:23:49 I think proofreading is really, really important
1:23:51 and I’m constantly embarrassed if I have a typo,
1:23:54 which, you know, as you know, as a writer,
1:23:56 you cannot prove your own work.
1:23:58 It just, your brain just does not see the errors
1:24:00 that we made in the first place,
1:24:02 more the majority of them.
1:24:04 And people are kind of merciless.
1:24:06 They think somehow that a typo makes you lazy
1:24:11 or I don’t even know.
1:24:13 There’s no kind of compassion for the humanity
1:24:15 that produces something as human as a typo, right?
1:24:19 Despite how mechanical the term itself seems,
1:24:21 which is sort of ironic, but in any case,
1:24:23 so yes, I have my assistant Bradman
1:24:25 and my copy editor for just proofing.
1:24:28 – What platform is brain picking on at the moment?
1:24:31 What’s the technology behind it?
1:24:33 I know that I’ve heard you mention WordPress before.
1:24:37 Is it on, is it still on WordPress?
1:24:39 – It is on WordPress.
1:24:39 I was gonna make a joke on her
1:24:41 of I had the technology, it’s called Corpus Colossum,
1:24:43 but I haven’t heard of that.
1:24:45 (laughing)
1:24:47 The actual technology is, yeah.
1:24:50 – Very Sam Harris friendly joke.
1:24:52 So when you’re working with, say, your copy editor,
1:24:55 do you give your copy editor admin access to WordPress
1:25:01 and she’ll go in, proofread it,
1:25:04 and then schedule or publish?
1:25:06 What’s the process?
1:25:07 – No, it’s a very, again,
1:25:09 sort of hacked together process,
1:25:12 which is every night I email her the articles
1:25:15 from the preview page on WordPress.
1:25:18 I just copy that and paste it into a body email
1:25:21 and I send it to her
1:25:22 and then she sends me the corrections via email.
1:25:24 – Got it.
1:25:25 – I mean, like I said, she’s not very,
1:25:28 I would say tech savvy.
1:25:29 I mean, I’m sure she’s a wonderful learner,
1:25:32 so I’m sure she would totally learn how to do it
1:25:34 if I gave her admin access,
1:25:36 but between that and the fact that I write in HTML,
1:25:39 so I really don’t like the whizzy way.
1:25:41 I hate it, actually.
1:25:43 I think it’s just easier to do it via email
1:25:45 ’cause then she can highlight the word
1:25:47 and sometimes she would make suggestions
1:25:49 that are more stylistic
1:25:50 and I would like to have the final say in those
1:25:53 ’cause very often I wanna keep it the way that I have it
1:25:56 because I’m voiced.
1:25:58 – So I find email works just fine.
1:26:01 – Got it.
1:26:02 Okay, I know I’m always fascinated
1:26:03 because I will use,
1:26:05 while when I was hosting WordPress elsewhere,
1:26:08 I’m also in WordPress,
1:26:09 I would use the share a draft plugin
1:26:13 to share drafts with people.
1:26:14 I’m now on WordPress VIP.
1:26:16 It has a sharing function
1:26:17 where people can leave feedback in a sidebar
1:26:21 that runs alongside the article itself,
1:26:24 which is pretty cool.
1:26:24 – Oh, that’s cool.
1:26:25 I should look into that.
1:26:26 I think that’s what I have too.
1:26:27 The WordPress VIP that we’re fetching out.
1:26:31 I don’t even know what that function is.
1:26:33 I’m kind of, I mean, for somebody who writes on the web,
1:26:36 I don’t really, yeah,
1:26:39 I sometimes only learn about things through friends.
1:26:43 – Well, I think, yeah,
1:26:44 that’s how I learned about a lot of this stuff
1:26:45 and the other option that I’ve used quite a lot
1:26:49 is and as much as I hate Word and I really do,
1:26:52 I love the track changes feature
1:26:54 and I just find it more user-friendly for a lot of folks
1:26:58 than having them use something that’s cloud-based
1:27:01 like Google Docs,
1:27:03 just because I operate so much offline
1:27:05 to try to get anything done.
1:27:07 – Yeah, I mean, that’s what a lot of people suggest
1:27:09 and what Kai, my perforator actually asked originally,
1:27:12 but I do not own Microsoft products on principle
1:27:16 and I just said I’m not gonna deal with it.
1:27:20 – Okay, no, that makes sense.
1:27:21 And your assistant, what was the defining moment,
1:27:24 the straw that broke the camel’s back
1:27:26 when you were like, you know what?
1:27:27 Like what was the day where you’re just like,
1:27:29 fucking enough of this?
1:27:30 Like I need to get somebody stat.
1:27:33 I mean, when did you actually make the decision?
1:27:36 – It wasn’t so much that I made the decision
1:27:38 and the decision was very strongly, lovingly,
1:27:42 but strongly sort of pushed on me by my partner
1:27:46 who one day said, you’re using so much time
1:27:48 and things that are just so menial and you should not.
1:27:51 And ’cause I was really stressing to a point
1:27:54 of just driving myself crazy.
1:27:56 And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact
1:27:58 that I always have been very independent.
1:28:01 I moved away from my parents’ house when I was 18,
1:28:04 came out late to her school, lived always by myself
1:28:06 and I just had this Emerson like,
1:28:08 you know, just had some self-sufficiency
1:28:11 and self-reliance to a point of pathology
1:28:14 where it was to my own detriment
1:28:16 and the notion of outsourcing felt to me on some level,
1:28:21 almost like an admission of weakness.
1:28:23 – Sure.
1:28:23 – It’s ridiculous.
1:28:24 – I think that’s true for a lot of people though, yeah.
1:28:26 – I know and the strange thing, the disorienting thing
1:28:29 is that I think we intellectually know that’s not the case.
1:28:32 That it’s actually a lot of strength to be able
1:28:35 to delegate and to sort of divvy up control
1:28:39 according to a hierarchy of priorities.
1:28:41 But on some sort of psycho-emotional level,
1:28:43 it is just, duh, to consider that you cannot do something
1:28:48 on your own anymore.
1:28:49 And of course, it’s interesting in terms
1:28:52 of how brain pickings evolve,
1:28:53 which has always been very organic.
1:28:55 So the sort of eight-year thing that has happened,
1:29:00 it went from being a little newsletter
1:29:03 that contained five links, no text,
1:29:05 like five links to five things that I found very interesting.
1:29:10 And then it went to sort of five links
1:29:13 with a little paragraph about each.
1:29:15 About why this thing is interesting and important.
1:29:16 And then it was not a little paragraph,
1:29:18 but a little like one page piece.
1:29:20 And then it became not five things every Friday,
1:29:24 but three things every day of the week,
1:29:26 pretty long form in the thousands of words, you know.
1:29:29 And I foolishly and naively thought that I could just have
1:29:34 the same sort of operational framework
1:29:37 despite the enormous swelling of just the volume
1:29:41 of the writing, and that’s unreasonable.
1:29:44 It’s completely unreasonable.
1:29:46 So at one point last fall,
1:29:48 at the sort of seventh birthday
1:29:50 of brain pickings is approaching,
1:29:52 my partner was just like, please, like consider.
1:29:55 – I’m always curious to ask,
1:29:57 how did you find the assistant that you ended up with?
1:30:01 – Well, she’s wonderful.
1:30:02 She’s a professional sort of personal assistant
1:30:04 that’s had this type of job for about 20 years.
1:30:08 She’s just a wonderfully warm and just generous person,
1:30:11 but also has such doggedness about things
1:30:15 and just work ethic.
1:30:16 It’s unbelievable.
1:30:17 And you always have the sense
1:30:19 that she’s looking out for your best interests
1:30:21 in the most magnanimous kind of way towards you,
1:30:25 but also the most warmly, no bullshit way outwardly
1:30:30 towards the world demanding things from you.
1:30:32 And having this buffer, it’s really, really great.
1:30:36 – How did you track her down?
1:30:37 How did the two of you get connected?
1:30:40 – Just a recommendation.
1:30:41 She’s been working for somebody who’s a very trusted
1:30:45 dear person for a long time to now she works with us.
1:30:48 – And did that person reach out to you?
1:30:50 Did you reach out to her?
1:30:51 I’m always curious about the specifics
1:30:53 because the way that I found one of my first assistants
1:30:56 and we worked together for many years
1:30:58 was anytime I had a really fantastic interaction
1:31:01 with someone’s assistant, I would say,
1:31:03 hey, I know this is off topic,
1:31:05 but you’ve been awesome to deal with.
1:31:06 Do you have, you know, twin brother, twin sister,
1:31:09 somebody who does what you do as well as you do it
1:31:13 that you could recommend to me because I need some help.
1:31:15 And I just did that over and over again.
1:31:17 And eventually one of them said, well,
1:31:18 actually I worked for multiple clients
1:31:20 so we could talk about it.
1:31:21 And that’s how we ended up working together.
1:31:23 But what was the…
1:31:24 – The introduction was made by the person.
1:31:27 So I had met her, at least in my assistant,
1:31:29 I’d met her just socially many times before.
1:31:32 And so eventually when the time came for me to consider,
1:31:36 we set up a meeting, we talked and she was really into it
1:31:39 and she’d been reading brain pickles.
1:31:41 And I asked, make sure it wouldn’t be too much
1:31:43 on her plate ’cause she’s also, I mean, she’s super woman.
1:31:45 Lisa’s super woman, she is the mother of two kids,
1:31:48 one of whom is now her first year in high school
1:31:51 and the other one his first year in college.
1:31:53 So she had that on her plate too.
1:31:56 But she’s very, like I said, very dogged,
1:31:58 very sort of dedicated and she was like, I can do it.
1:32:01 I’d like to do it.
1:32:02 And I was like, great, let’s roll.
1:32:04 – Onward.
1:32:05 So with your assistant, if you were to do an 80/20 analysis
1:32:09 of the 20% of tasks that take up 80% of her time,
1:32:14 what would those look like?
1:32:16 What is the vast majority of her time spent on?
1:32:19 – A lot of it is, I guess, coordinating travel and things,
1:32:23 but I am trying to really, I mean,
1:32:24 I have this new-ish commitment to really not do any speaking
1:32:29 at commercial conferences anymore,
1:32:32 but to speak to students because I think it’s important
1:32:34 and what it takes out of me, which is a lot,
1:32:37 speaking takes out a lot of me because I’m a writer
1:32:40 and I also don’t really recycle talks.
1:32:42 I like to write something original.
1:32:44 And when it’s a commercial conference,
1:32:46 it just doesn’t add up for me what I get out of it
1:32:48 ’cause I usually donate my commission’s duty
1:32:50 to the local public library and whatnot.
1:32:52 But with students, it is worth my time if I initiate
1:32:56 even one journalism student friend
1:33:00 going into buzz-worthy lands after graduation.
1:33:04 That’s worth it to me.
1:33:05 And so even though I’ve scaled back on the speaking-speaking,
1:33:08 I now am getting like all these college requests.
1:33:12 And so that takes so much time, especially coordinating
1:33:15 because a lot of them are organized
1:33:17 by sort of student volunteers
1:33:18 and they’re kind of still learning what it means
1:33:21 to schedule the deadlines and advance notice.
1:33:24 And so Melissa is sort of railing that.
1:33:27 And another big part, I should also mention
1:33:30 that the evolution of what I’ve been able to delegate
1:33:32 has sort of organically happened.
1:33:34 Originally, I just really didn’t know what to give her.
1:33:37 I felt like I had to do all of it
1:33:39 ’cause I didn’t know how to explain it to her to do.
1:33:41 But she’s a great learner
1:33:43 and I’m learning to delegate more.
1:33:45 But another thing, because my site runs on donations,
1:33:50 I sort of make an effort to send handwritten thank you cards
1:33:53 just at this point, randomly picked donors every month.
1:33:58 And so I have her sort of export those names
1:34:00 and emails for me and just prepare envelopes
1:34:03 and all those types of things
1:34:05 so that I could not spend too much time
1:34:06 on the actual admin of the mailing.
1:34:09 – Do you communicate exclusively via email
1:34:11 or do you use other types of software?
1:34:13 – Oh, email, email and text.
1:34:15 – Email and text.
1:34:16 So no project management software at this point,
1:34:18 no sort of base camp or a sauna or anything like that.
1:34:21 – That would make me feel like
1:34:23 up some sort of commercial organization.
1:34:25 You know, I still have so much resistance
1:34:27 to the fact that I even have to deal with these things.
1:34:30 – Back to the Oscar Wilde hypocrisy about audience.
1:34:33 There’s a humanity, I guess, of the tension.
1:34:36 – A couple of quick ones.
1:34:37 So the first is when you lift,
1:34:38 do you tend to have the same workout?
1:34:40 What does your weightlifting look like?
1:34:42 – It’s changed a lot.
1:34:43 In the last year and a half,
1:34:46 I’ve prioritized body weight stuff heavily, not unintended.
1:34:51 That was actually total inadvertence,
1:34:52 this how language, how we think in language.
1:34:55 That’s so funny.
1:34:55 I prioritize body weight stuff.
1:34:57 And so I do pull ups, push ups and that sort of thing.
1:35:00 It also depends on where I do my workout.
1:35:03 My building has a sort of gym,
1:35:06 like one of those residential gyms,
1:35:08 but I also have a membership at a larger,
1:35:10 probably I think the best gym in New York.
1:35:14 I love it, but I’m only there a few days a week.
1:35:16 So it just depends on where I do it and what I do.
1:35:19 – If you had to pick one, besides the elliptical,
1:35:22 if you had to pick one body weight exercise to hold you over,
1:35:26 let’s say you were traveling for a few months,
1:35:27 you can only pick one body weight exercise.
1:35:29 What would it be?
1:35:30 – Well, it would be pull up,
1:35:32 but you can’t always find a place to do it.
1:35:35 So I just do usually elevated push ups.
1:35:38 So my feet on a bench or bed
1:35:40 or some like a step or something and just push ups.
1:35:43 – Cool, a great little hack for pulling motions
1:35:46 while traveling is putting your feet on a chair
1:35:50 and going underneath a table
1:35:51 to do basically inverted bent rows.
1:35:55 You know what’s actually very helpful for traveling
1:35:57 is– – Plyometrics?
1:35:58 – Plyometrics and TRX is actually quite handy.
1:36:02 There’s a system.
1:36:04 – For some reason, it’s just not my thing.
1:36:06 – Can’t get into it.
1:36:07 Yeah.
1:36:08 – The thing is, if I am forced by circumstances
1:36:12 to do a workout that is not my preference,
1:36:14 I very much like to be able to do something else
1:36:17 while doing it such as listening to podcasts,
1:36:19 which is what I do while I do weights at the gym anyway.
1:36:23 And there are certain types of movements
1:36:24 that it’s just a hassle to have the headphones
1:36:27 and it’s just like not great.
1:36:29 – That’s true.
1:36:29 – So I actually carry a weighted jump rope with me
1:36:32 when I travel in case there’s nowhere to do sprints,
1:36:35 which is my plan B for cardio.
1:36:39 And then plan C is just jumping, skipping rope.
1:36:43 – You’re intense, I love it.
1:36:44 Every time I meet, and this is so silly,
1:36:46 but I was so obsessed with Bulgarian Olympic weightlifters
1:36:49 for a very long time that whenever I meet Bulgarians
1:36:52 or people who at any point have lived in Bulgaria,
1:36:54 I want to talk about Olympic weightlifting,
1:36:56 but it’s not.
1:36:57 – Kind of nothing about them.
1:36:59 I don’t do weight stuff when I was living in Bulgaria.
1:37:02 – No, exactly.
1:37:04 It’s kind of like, oh, you’re from Switzerland.
1:37:06 Let me talk to you about the guys
1:37:07 in the Riccolo commercial.
1:37:08 They’re like, no, we don’t talk about that stuff.
1:37:10 – Or what’s yet, is that guy your cousin?
1:37:12 – Yeah, right, right.
1:37:14 You must know, like, no, I actually don’t.
1:37:15 Like, I know I went to X, Y, and Z college,
1:37:18 but there are 5,000 people per year.
1:37:21 You know, it doesn’t always work out.
1:37:22 You mentioned the donations.
1:37:23 I want to talk about the site.
1:37:24 So, it appears, and I dug around a bit,
1:37:27 but it appears that you have no comments
1:37:29 or dates on your posts.
1:37:30 Is that accurate?
1:37:32 – I don’t have comments.
1:37:33 I do have dates.
1:37:34 They’re in the URL.
1:37:35 That should the date be up.
1:37:36 – Oh, they’re in the URL,
1:37:37 but they’re not in the post,
1:37:38 they’re in the URL structure,
1:37:39 but they’re not in the displayed post itself.
1:37:42 – Yeah, so the reason for that is because
1:37:45 I do think we live in an enormously
1:37:48 nude, fetishistic culture.
1:37:51 And the reason I do what I do
1:37:54 is precisely to decondition that
1:37:56 because we think that if something is not news
1:37:59 and it’s not at the top of the search results
1:38:01 or the top of the feed,
1:38:02 because all feeds are reverse chronology,
1:38:04 then there’s an implicit hierarchy of importance to that.
1:38:08 We think if it’s not at the top, it’s not important.
1:38:11 And you would understand,
1:38:13 writing about Seneca,
1:38:14 it really doesn’t matter what the date stamp on it is,
1:38:16 but I think because culture conditions are so much,
1:38:20 people, when they see a date stamp,
1:38:22 they sort of think, oh, this was like two years old.
1:38:25 And it’s really, you know, 2,000 years old.
1:38:28 But the thought of academics actually use
1:38:31 brain pickings to reference.
1:38:32 So I constantly get things,
1:38:34 this is another thing that Lisa deals with,
1:38:36 like requests from textbooks for citations or whatnot.
1:38:40 And those people actually need the date.
1:38:42 So I’ve made it so that if you actually look,
1:38:45 it’s kind of easy to see,
1:38:46 or I can just tell them when they write
1:38:48 and ask me what the date is, look in the URL,
1:38:50 but it’s just not one of those immediate things
1:38:52 that slaps you over the head,
1:38:54 like a newspaper front page, you know?
1:38:56 – Definitely.
1:38:57 I actually have done the same thing for quite a few years.
1:39:02 And if you go to any permalinks,
1:39:04 if you get linked to any of my posts directly on the blog,
1:39:07 the date is there in the URL,
1:39:09 but also at the very bottom of the post
1:39:12 after the related links.
1:39:14 So for the same reason,
1:39:15 because there’s so much bias against older material.
1:39:18 And I think some of my older stuff is,
1:39:21 I mean, it depends on the person,
1:39:22 obviously in the context,
1:39:23 but it’s an easy way to have a high sort of abandonment rate
1:39:27 is to timestamp the comments.
1:39:29 Did you ever have comments or have you never had comments?
1:39:31 – I did originally.
1:39:33 And then I was like, you know what?
1:39:34 I kind of feel like Herzog does.
1:39:37 I don’t really care to hear.
1:39:38 I mean, I do write for me.
1:39:39 I’m very gladdened by people who are in any way moved or touched.
1:39:43 But the comments I was getting,
1:39:45 I’ve been fortunate enough not to really get any, you know,
1:39:48 trolling or anything like that.
1:39:49 But they were kind of vacant
1:39:51 or people trying to plug their own thing or spam.
1:39:54 And it was taking more of my time that was worth.
1:39:56 And so instead of made my contact information
1:40:00 very easily accessible.
1:40:01 So if someone has something of substance and urgency to say,
1:40:05 which is I think the two things
1:40:07 that can help people to reach out,
1:40:09 they’ll do it via email behind their own name
1:40:12 and not anonymously.
1:40:13 And then, I mean, I did get a lot of, a lot of emails from readers
1:40:17 and those are valuable, you know?
1:40:20 But I don’t really care for comments.
1:40:21 Now the flip side of that is that
1:40:24 now that I have the Facebook page having something mysterious
1:40:28 happened with the Bring Pick and Spageal page last fall work,
1:40:31 it just started growing so fast, I have no idea why.
1:40:34 – You know, I was gonna ask you about that
1:40:35 because if you look at say that your Twitter follower growth
1:40:38 versus your Facebook growth,
1:40:39 the Facebook just kind of took off.
1:40:41 – Yeah, it was in about October of last year
1:40:43 and it went from 250,000 to now, I think, I don’t know.
1:40:47 – 2. something million.
1:40:48 – Close to three maybe.
1:40:49 So more than 10 fold in less than a year.
1:40:52 I have no idea why I’ve done nothing differently.
1:40:54 I’m very, I don’t really enjoy Facebook.
1:40:56 I do it reluctantly because I get a lot of emails
1:40:59 from readers elsewhere in the world
1:41:01 who actually use Facebook as their primary thing.
1:41:04 And they’re such sweet notes.
1:41:05 You know, people who just are stimulated and inspired
1:41:08 and moved in a way that perhaps they wouldn’t be
1:41:11 if they hadn’t read that piece about some random thing
1:41:14 that I read and wrote about.
1:41:15 And I think it would be selfish of me
1:41:17 to just sort of disable Facebook because I hate it.
1:41:20 But the points of it is that you have comments on there.
1:41:24 And Lisa, my assistant, actually,
1:41:26 that’s something I delegated her a few months ago
1:41:28 just to completely deal with them.
1:41:31 I can’t deal with them.
1:41:32 And not for any other reason that I have complete allergy
1:41:37 to people pronouncing their so-called opinions
1:41:41 without having actually digested
1:41:43 or even engaged with the thing.
1:41:44 So people would comment on the basis of like a thumbnail image
1:41:48 or the title, make really outrageously inaccurate comments,
1:41:52 clearly not having read the piece.
1:41:54 And this kind of snap reaction thing
1:41:59 that I think social media to a large extent perpetuate,
1:42:02 I can’t deal with it.
1:42:03 It’s just, it’s like a psychic drain.
1:42:05 Like, I can’t even explain it just, I can’t.
1:42:07 – So that would explain,
1:42:08 that would answer one of my questions,
1:42:09 which is in your header picture on Facebook,
1:42:13 you have, this should be a cardinal rule of the internet,
1:42:16 end of being human.
1:42:17 If you don’t have the patience to read something,
1:42:18 don’t have the hubris to comment on it.
1:42:21 – Yeah, I don’t care if it sounds like bitsy or anything.
1:42:26 You know, it’s interesting
1:42:27 because I think a lot about criticism
1:42:30 and the notion of criticism
1:42:31 and why it’s so hard for anybody.
1:42:35 And I don’t think that people have a hard time
1:42:38 with criticism because another person disagrees with
1:42:43 or dislikes what they’re saying.
1:42:45 They really have a hard time when they feel misunderstood.
1:42:48 The other person does not understand who they are
1:42:52 or what they stand for in the world.
1:42:53 And 90% of the time, and you actually touch on this
1:42:56 in your conversation with Sam Harris
1:42:58 where you say that his ideas are not as controversial
1:43:01 as people think when they don’t actually understand
1:43:03 what they are.
1:43:04 But the main source of anguish is not being seen
1:43:09 for who you are, not being understood.
1:43:11 And this kind of reactive culture where people comment
1:43:14 without taking the care to understand
1:43:16 what you’re expressing clearly or what you stand for,
1:43:19 it is so toxic.
1:43:20 It is so toxic to leaders, to writers, to us as a culture.
1:43:24 And I just don’t know how to get around it
1:43:27 other than just having instructed Lisa
1:43:29 to be just merciless about banning people
1:43:32 and deleting comments that are just not,
1:43:35 there’s no humanity, there’s no patience,
1:43:37 there’s no thinking in them.
1:43:38 So, you know, anybody who writes online,
1:43:42 I think feel similarly that this is kind of my home
1:43:46 and if people come and be idiots in it,
1:43:49 then they’re not welcome there, so.
1:43:51 – Yeah, no, I actually use the exact same analogy.
1:43:54 I say, look, I view my, especially on my blog,
1:43:56 I view the comments as my living room.
1:43:58 And if you come into my house for the first time
1:44:00 and get raging drunk and put your feet up on my table
1:44:02 with your shoes on, you’re not gonna be invited back,
1:44:05 you’re gone, you know?
1:44:06 So is your assistant’s job, as it relates to Facebook then,
1:44:09 primarily calling the herd and just removing the idiots?
1:44:12 Or what are other instructions, if any?
1:44:14 Are there things that she passes to you?
1:44:16 Are there things that she responds to?
1:44:18 – No, I don’t really care what people say again
1:44:21 to the point that if people have something of substance
1:44:24 and urgency, they will reach out.
1:44:25 And I’m then very happy to hear from actual humans
1:44:29 and engage in the human dialogue, which I do.
1:44:31 But I really care about, you know, the comments on Facebook.
1:44:33 I just don’t want them depressing me when I go on the page
1:44:37 ’cause I put my own thing under.
1:44:39 Alicia doesn’t put the actual postings.
1:44:41 And I also don’t want them creating a culture
1:44:45 that is antithetical to the very reason why I do what I do,
1:44:49 which is a kind of faith in the human spirit.
1:44:51 I mean, that’s where I come from.
1:44:53 I am a cautious one sometimes, but an optimist
1:44:56 about their so-called human condition.
1:44:58 And anybody who craps on that
1:45:01 without having even given a chance to the thoughts
1:45:04 that speak to those ideals,
1:45:06 which is what my articles are a record of,
1:45:08 then I will want them gone, you know?
1:45:10 And so her instructions are just, you know,
1:45:12 ban people who are offensive to others
1:45:16 sort of in a vicious way as opposed to just having
1:45:18 rational discourse of disagreement,
1:45:20 ban people who are ignorant and have not read the thing
1:45:24 and have some very scandalous
1:45:27 or not even scandalous sort of…
1:45:29 – Sensationalist. – Contrarian,
1:45:30 sensationalist take on it,
1:45:32 clearly not understanding the nuance
1:45:35 because, I mean, a culture of news is,
1:45:37 I say often a culture without nuance, so, yeah.
1:45:41 So that’s basically it.
1:45:43 Help me stay sane when I look at them.
1:45:45 That’s her task.
1:45:46 If you lose my mind over exasperation
1:45:50 when people is impatient.
1:45:52 – No, and I really respect that
1:45:53 because another reason that I read brain pickings
1:45:57 as opposed to other sites,
1:45:59 and I feel comfortable going there,
1:46:00 is that I feel it is sort of a stronghold
1:46:03 of positivity and optimism in a lot of respects.
1:46:06 So kudos. – Thank you.
1:46:08 – The email, actually, before we get to email,
1:46:13 I’ve read that you schedule your Twitter and Facebook,
1:46:16 which would make sense because you’re prolific.
1:46:19 If it’s still the case,
1:46:20 what do you use to schedule that social media?
1:46:24 – I use Buffer for Twitter,
1:46:27 and I use just my hands for Facebook, yeah.
1:46:31 But again, I mean,
1:46:32 this goes back to the same inner struggle of,
1:46:34 I do wanna be reading and writing for myself.
1:46:38 So why do I have the compulsions
1:46:40 for so much of it out there?
1:46:42 And I self-glagulate over that,
1:46:46 ’cause on some level,
1:46:47 it does seem like a form of hypocrisy,
1:46:49 but then I do think about the people
1:46:51 that email me from India and Pakistan
1:46:53 and South Africa and Korea and wherever,
1:46:56 that actually, that’s how they connect.
1:46:59 And I think if I’m putting in the amount of time
1:47:01 that I do into what I do,
1:47:03 even if I do it for myself,
1:47:05 I might as well just harness that time anyway.
1:47:08 It could benefit somebody else’s journey, you know?
1:47:10 And so I do it because of that, mostly.
1:47:13 – Definitely, and I think that,
1:47:16 while it’s fine to write for yourself,
1:47:18 if you keep the value of what you write to yourself
1:47:23 when it could benefit a lot of other people,
1:47:25 then I think that’s actually,
1:47:27 it could be viewed as a selfish act.
1:47:29 So I think that there’s,
1:47:32 particularly when you’re curating in the way that you do
1:47:34 and you’re saving people thousands of hours of searching
1:47:38 by distilling a lot of these concepts.
1:47:40 – Well, I would argue that the benefit, the value,
1:47:44 I mean, what I do is kind of the antithesis of search.
1:47:46 It’s a discovery of things that,
1:47:49 ideally, one would not have come across
1:47:52 within the usual parameters of one’s filter bubble, right?
1:47:55 So sort of a lot of the people that I hear from,
1:47:59 for example, you know, just the sweet tunes,
1:48:01 the Seneca example, actually, just this week,
1:48:03 I heard from this guy who was an IT person,
1:48:06 trained as a physicist, ended up doing IT and said,
1:48:09 “The Seneca, the shortness of life piece,
1:48:11 “really put everything in perspective.
1:48:13 “I’ve never really read philosophy,
1:48:14 “never been interested in it,
1:48:15 “never looked for it,
1:48:16 “but it just cut in the middle
1:48:18 “of what I’m struggling with right now in my own life.”
1:48:21 It gives you pause to hear that from people.
1:48:24 – Definitely.
1:48:25 Agreed.
1:48:26 On email.
1:48:27 If you go to your contact page,
1:48:28 you recommend email charter.org.
1:48:31 And I’m very curious to hear
1:48:35 if people actually follow the email charter
1:48:38 in terms of the email that you receive.
1:48:41 Do people actually pay attention to that
1:48:43 and follow those?
1:48:43 – They do, and I’m so grateful.
1:48:46 And I mean, but the majority of them do, you know,
1:48:48 some people who reach out with the intention
1:48:52 of self-promoting, there’s usually laziness
1:48:54 to people who self-promote for the sake they’re of, you know?
1:48:58 So they don’t usually follow.
1:49:00 But people who actually care to have a conversation
1:49:03 and to engage are very courteous
1:49:06 and very sort of mindful of what I’ve asked,
1:49:10 except for publicists who are never.
1:49:12 – Yeah, right.
1:49:12 I suppose if they’re flying on autopilot
1:49:15 and just blasting out a template.
1:49:17 – Dear blogger.
1:49:18 – Oh, yeah, I love that, the dear blogger.
1:49:20 – Yeah.
1:49:21 – You know what I get very often,
1:49:23 which I think is actually hilarious?
1:49:26 People who don’t even bother to read the name of the site.
1:49:29 So they addressed me, “Dear Brian.”
1:49:31 The pinnacle of this was when last year, at one point,
1:49:35 I opened my physical mailbox in my building, my home.
1:49:39 And I found this bundle from the USPS.
1:49:42 But with an elastic band around it of male
1:49:46 for somebody named Brian Pickens,
1:49:49 who lives in Long Beach, CA, or used to, I guess.
1:49:54 And somehow, that stuff got forwarded to me
1:49:57 because I guess the guy either moved
1:49:59 and the USPS somehow looked things up.
1:50:02 But I don’t know if it knew.
1:50:03 It was sort of a mystery and metaphor
1:50:07 for what I deal with online.
1:50:08 – So I used to have a company ages ago
1:50:11 called BrainQuicken.
1:50:12 And I got a telemarketing call one evening
1:50:15 and this guy goes, “Hi, sorry, if I’m interrupting,
1:50:19 “is this Brian?”
1:50:20 And I go, “Excuse me?”
1:50:21 And he goes, “Brian, Brian Chicken?”
1:50:23 And I’m like, “Brian Chicken.”
1:50:25 – Brian Chicken, yeah.
1:50:27 – I was like, “No, and take me off your list, goodbye.”
1:50:31 So on the email and pitching side of things,
1:50:34 or just on the pitching side of things,
1:50:36 how on earth do you deal with not just cold inquiries
1:50:41 but how do you deal with writer friends
1:50:43 or acquaintances who are writers
1:50:45 that you don’t want to be rude to
1:50:46 who want you to read their books?
1:50:48 How do you polite decline that stuff?
1:50:51 And maybe you don’t get a lot of it.
1:50:52 I get a ton of it.
1:50:54 And the fact of the matter is not everyone is able
1:50:57 to put the time or effort into writing a good book.
1:51:00 So inevitably, if I get 10 books from decent
1:51:04 or good friends, some of them are gonna be terrible.
1:51:07 And I don’t have the time necessarily
1:51:08 or the inclination to read them all.
1:51:09 How do you deal with that type of situation?
1:51:13 – Well, I guess you deal first and foremost
1:51:16 by controlling not the outcome but the cause,
1:51:20 which is your circle of friends and acquaintances.
1:51:23 I’m very selected about the people I surround myself with.
1:51:27 And I’d like to think friendly
1:51:29 to pretty much everybody that I meet,
1:51:32 but my circle of actual friends is really close
1:51:35 and really tight and people who are just,
1:51:37 when the sky crumbles, they’re gonna be there
1:51:39 and we’re there for each other.
1:51:40 And so with that in mind,
1:51:42 I think there is a certain boundary
1:51:44 that you have to put up beforehand
1:51:47 to, I guess, manage social expectations in a way.
1:51:50 And so for those people, my friend friends,
1:51:53 in large part, I mean, I should mention
1:51:54 that the majority of my close friends,
1:51:56 including my partner too,
1:51:58 are people that I have met just through what I do.
1:52:00 So there’s already the self-selection of sensibility
1:52:03 and ideals and I think we become a centripetal force
1:52:08 for the kinds of people we wanna be
1:52:11 and surround ourselves with those types of people.
1:52:13 William Gibson has a wonderful word for it.
1:52:15 He calls it personal microculture.
1:52:17 And even when you said early on the kinship of spirits,
1:52:20 I think that’s so important.
1:52:21 So which is the long-winded way I can say
1:52:23 that when and if those inner circle people put a book out,
1:52:28 it’s a guarantee that I will like it
1:52:31 because of who they are.
1:52:32 – And so then I’m more than happy to support it.
1:52:34 I mean, the book that we started with,
1:52:36 The Gratchin’ Sniff Guide to Wine, Wendy,
1:52:39 the illustrator is precisely that type of person,
1:52:42 somebody who I met through what each of us does
1:52:44 and she’s now one of my closest human beings, you know?
1:52:47 And so of course I’m gonna support her work,
1:52:48 but not because I’m being nepotistic about it,
1:52:51 but because that’s the prerequirement
1:52:53 that I am moved by her work and respected and love it.
1:52:57 And that’s how we became friends.
1:52:59 But outside of that inner circle,
1:53:01 I think acquaintances know that there’s no such expectation.
1:53:06 And when I do get such requests, it’s a matter of,
1:53:09 well, did the person do their homework
1:53:12 in knowing what I actually think and write about?
1:53:15 ‘Cause very often, I’m sure you get that too,
1:53:17 you get pitched things that are just so outside
1:53:19 of what you do, in which case I don’t even feel compelled
1:53:22 to respond because if they didn’t put in the time
1:53:24 to understand what I’m interested in,
1:53:27 why should I put in the time to explain to them
1:53:29 why this is not a fit?
1:53:30 – Yeah, that’s a great way to put it.
1:53:31 I need to embrace that more.
1:53:33 I think that’s an area where I carry a lot of guilt.
1:53:36 – Guilt, yeah, but guilt, it’s interesting
1:53:39 because guilt is kind of the flip side of prestige
1:53:42 and they’re both horrible reasons to do things.
1:53:46 So often we would agree as humans,
1:53:48 not just you and me or just anybody,
1:53:49 would agree to do things
1:53:50 because they sound prestigious in some way, you know?
1:53:54 And equally avoid things because of the guilt thing
1:53:57 or do things because of the guilt thing,
1:53:59 but sort of this whole Buddhist thing about aversion,
1:54:03 you know, avoidance and aversion
1:54:05 and making decisions based out of either fear,
1:54:08 which is what guilt is,
1:54:09 it’s the fear of disappointing somebody
1:54:11 and then feeling disappointed in yourself
1:54:13 or out of sort of grasping for approval or acclaim,
1:54:18 which is what doing things for prestige is.
1:54:20 I think either of those are really bad reasons to do things
1:54:24 and yet they motivate us a lot
1:54:26 or at least they sort of lurk
1:54:28 in the back of the mind constantly
1:54:30 and it is a real practice to try to decondition that.
1:54:34 – Definitely.
1:54:34 No, I like what you said about why put in the effort
1:54:37 to explain why it’s not a fit
1:54:38 if they haven’t done the homework to determine if it is a fit.
1:54:41 I think that’s a great way to put it.
1:54:42 I wanna ask, and I know we don’t have too much time left,
1:54:45 so hopefully sometime, someday we can do a follow-up part too.
1:54:49 I think that’d be a blast.
1:54:50 I’ll bring some more back if you actually have to take one.
1:54:52 So yeah, I can introduce you to it firsthand.
1:54:55 But the donations, I’m very fascinated
1:54:57 by the ad-free donation approach
1:55:01 and just to keep it simple,
1:55:03 if you had to choose, say, 20% of the options
1:55:08 you’re currently offering, which would you choose and why?
1:55:11 In other words, you have,
1:55:13 so people can make a one-time single contribution
1:55:16 or they can become a member
1:55:19 and donate seven, three, 10, or $25 a month.
1:55:23 What I’m trying to ask without being improprietist
1:55:27 or making you feel uncomfortable is what is working best?
1:55:31 When you’re asking people for donations,
1:55:33 assuming that it’s working,
1:55:35 if someone were to offer one or two options
1:55:37 instead of four options per month
1:55:39 or the single contribution versus the membership
1:55:41 or the membership versus the single contribution,
1:55:44 what would your advice be to people?
1:55:46 – Well, I will preface this with the caveat
1:55:48 that I use PayPal for donations
1:55:50 and I can, for the life of me,
1:55:52 figure out how to actually look at the data
1:55:55 and get any sort of real reason.
1:55:57 All of it is so antiquated,
1:55:58 their export tool and such,
1:56:00 and I’m not that interested.
1:56:02 I would spy for days into looking into it,
1:56:04 so I can tell you sort of my intuitive interpretation.
1:56:07 – Sure, yeah, great.
1:56:08 – And by the way, the only reason these options are as they are
1:56:11 is also the reason why I don’t have an ad-supported site,
1:56:14 which is, I just asked myself,
1:56:16 what would I like to read as a reader?
1:56:19 Well, I would like an ad-free site,
1:56:20 and how would I like to support that?
1:56:23 Well, I’d like to have a few options,
1:56:25 just because I don’t wanna be sort of confined to something.
1:56:28 And so I just pulled it out of the hat, basically,
1:56:31 with these tiers and I’ve just left them on,
1:56:34 since I put them on, they seem to work, whatever.
1:56:36 And originally, my sense was that the one-time donations
1:56:41 accounted for much more,
1:56:43 but I’d never actually analyzed it
1:56:45 because I think I see the alerts that come from PayPal
1:56:49 and sometimes people would send really large
1:56:51 one-time donations, like things that are totally humbling
1:56:54 and enormously generous.
1:56:56 And I think those kind of,
1:56:57 you kind of weigh them somehow as more
1:57:01 than the cumulative sum of the smaller donations.
1:57:04 So I thought the one-timers work much more.
1:57:07 And I’m pretty sure that must’ve been the case earlier on.
1:57:11 – Right.
1:57:12 – And I’ve had the recurring ones,
1:57:14 I’ve had the one-time donations for as long as I can remember,
1:57:17 for as long as I basically needed to start making money
1:57:20 for the site, because by the way,
1:57:22 running the site cost me several times my rent.
1:57:25 Like all the costs associated with it, it’s like crazy.
1:57:29 So at one point, I got to a point where I had to make money.
1:57:32 I said, “I don’t wanna do ads,
1:57:33 “I don’t believe in that, I’ll have just donations.”
1:57:35 And I didn’t even think of recurring ones at the time
1:57:37 that was years ago.
1:57:39 And then my friend, Max Linsky,
1:57:41 who runs longform.org, who were having tea,
1:57:43 and he said, “Well, why didn’t you like
1:57:45 “push the recurring ones more?
1:57:46 “Cause it’s working really great for us.”
1:57:48 And at that point, I had the option,
1:57:50 but it was buried somewhere on my donation
1:57:52 about Pange or something.
1:57:54 I said, “Okay, so I put it in the sidebar.”
1:57:57 And that was, I wanna say, maybe 2011.
1:58:00 And it started occurring slowly.
1:58:02 And so this past year, when I did my taxes,
1:58:05 I very reluctantly went to deal with all the PayPal tools
1:58:09 to get the data out, basically.
1:58:11 And I actually had Lisa pull all the Excel and whatnot.
1:58:14 And then I did the tally to see, and to my surprise,
1:58:18 the recurring ones, which are very small individual amount,
1:58:22 actually were two-to-one ratio to the one-time donation.
1:58:26 – Wow.
1:58:27 – And I don’t know at what point it tipped over,
1:58:29 but I think because of the scale
1:58:31 and just how many people have these tiny, tiny donations
1:58:35 that they contribute every month,
1:58:37 I mean, that’s such an active commitment,
1:58:38 and it’s so generous that they add up.
1:58:41 And my guess is that as time goes on,
1:58:44 ’cause the recurring ones have only been available
1:58:46 for the last two and a half, three years, whatever,
1:58:50 they would become by far the larger financial support
1:58:55 compared to the single ones.
1:58:57 – Sure, I know that makes sense.
1:58:59 If you had to choose, and of course, this is hypothetical,
1:59:02 but if you had to choose two of the amounts
1:59:03 to leave in the dropdown,
1:59:05 so you have $7 a month, $3, $10, $25.
1:59:08 If you had to choose two of those to leave up,
1:59:10 which would you choose?
1:59:11 – Oh, I have no idea.
1:59:13 Probably just the mathematical logical choice,
1:59:16 the two in the middle, the three and 10.
1:59:19 – Okay, no, I’m just very curious about this kind of thing.
1:59:22 I think you’ve approached the blog
1:59:24 in a very authentic way with the content,
1:59:27 and I can’t emphasize strongly enough
1:59:30 what you just said, which is you base what you do
1:59:34 on what you would like or dislike as a reader
1:59:37 in the case of something with text.
1:59:39 It doesn’t have to be super complicated.
1:59:41 It doesn’t have to be doing tons of analytics
1:59:44 for months before you make a decision.
1:59:45 Just ask yourself, would this annoy the shit out of me?
1:59:47 If so, don’t do it.
1:59:49 Would I love this?
1:59:50 If so, try it out.
1:59:52 – Every decision too has been that way,
1:59:54 and actually in the last couple of years,
1:59:56 I’ve been getting really annoyed.
1:59:58 I mean, brain picking is a pretty sort of low fly site,
2:00:01 as you can see, it’s just very super simple, basic,
2:00:04 but I’ve been getting annoyed that it doesn’t load very well
2:00:07 on my iPhone when I want to look at something
2:00:08 or pull something up to repress or iPad.
2:00:12 And my friend, Scott Belsky, who runs Behance,
2:00:15 he’s a great guy, and he’s been sort of a very generous donor,
2:00:18 just supporting, and one time he pulls me aside,
2:00:22 that was like a thing in February and March,
2:00:23 and he’s like, you know how much I love brain picking,
2:00:26 but the site sucks.
2:00:28 We didn’t say it in that way,
2:00:29 but he was super sweet about it,
2:00:31 and he offered to connect me with this guy
2:00:33 that he knew that I could hire to do a responsive design,
2:00:36 and I always have this resistance
2:00:38 to making these sort of technological improvements,
2:00:40 because then I feel like,
2:00:42 I don’t want to be a media company,
2:00:44 like I don’t want to be a buzzfeed,
2:00:47 but at the end of the day, I as a reader,
2:00:49 and as a sort of engager with that experience
2:00:53 with being annoyed by it myself,
2:00:54 so now I’m in the middle of releasing
2:00:57 like a simple responsive site
2:00:59 that is actually easy to read on your phone,
2:01:01 and so, yeah.
2:01:03 It’s despair and frustration prevail again, innovation.
2:01:08 – Yeah, it’s so, so worth it.
2:01:10 It took me, let’s see, it only took me three,
2:01:13 oh God, seven years to get a mobile version of the site,
2:01:18 ready to go, which I just launched a month or two ago,
2:01:21 so better late than never, I suppose.
2:01:22 Well, Maria, this has been a blast.
2:01:25 I really appreciate you taking the time.
2:01:27 If someone were to want to explore brain pickings,
2:01:31 what are a few articles you might suggest
2:01:33 that they start with or a few posts?
2:01:36 – Well, since we talk about it so much,
2:01:39 the Spheneca piece about the shortness of life,
2:01:42 fairly short, there’s a piece I did a couple of years ago
2:01:45 which was less about, it was not about a specific book,
2:01:48 just sort of things that I’ve been thinking about
2:01:51 for a long time, this disconnect between purpose
2:01:54 and prestige and why we do things, right?
2:01:56 Forget what it’s called.
2:01:57 I think it’s called how to do what you love
2:01:59 or how to find your purpose and do what you love,
2:02:02 and it was sort of an assemblage of thoughts on that
2:02:05 from various sources as well as my own,
2:02:07 and perhaps most of all, a piece that I wrote last fall
2:02:11 on the 7th birthday really at the site,
2:02:13 which was about seven things that I learned
2:02:15 in those seven years of reading, writing, and living.
2:02:18 – Which is a great article,
2:02:19 and I didn’t want to replicate everything in here,
2:02:22 so I sort of bobbed and weaved around
2:02:24 some of these subjects a little bit,
2:02:26 but just to reiterate something that you mentioned,
2:02:28 and that’s doing nothing for a prestige or status
2:02:31 or money or approval alone,
2:02:33 and I just want to quote Paul Graham here,
2:02:35 which you included, which is,
2:02:36 “Prostige is like a powerful magnet
2:02:37 that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy.
2:02:39 It causes you to work not on what you like,
2:02:41 but what you’d like to like.”
2:02:44 Which I think is so astute, and in closing, is there any–
2:02:48 – And also, I should just interject and say,
2:02:50 any Alan Watts piece, not because my writing about it
2:02:54 is so great or it’s not coming from a place of check me out,
2:02:57 it’s coming from a place of check him out.
2:02:59 Alan Watts has changed my life.
2:03:00 I’ve written about him quite a bit,
2:03:02 so I highly recommend any of those articles.
2:03:04 – All right, brainpickings.org is the site, guys.
2:03:07 Check it out.
2:03:08 Maria, any parting advice for this episode,
2:03:12 this portion of our conversation before we check out?
2:03:15 Any advice to the people listening out there,
2:03:17 thoughts, parting comments?
2:03:19 – No advice per se, just, I guess, a comment and a hope,
2:03:24 which is that, “Thank you so much.
2:03:26 Not just for having me, but for having this show
2:03:28 and for doing everything that you do.”
2:03:30 And I really hope we have more people who operate
2:03:34 out of such a place of just, I guess,
2:03:36 for lack of better word, idealism and conviction.
2:03:39 And thank you for setting Tony Thample that way.
2:03:42 – Well, that means a lot coming from you.
2:03:45 And I think you’re a tremendous force
2:03:47 for good out there in the world.
2:03:48 So I hope people check out your work.
2:03:50 I hope you continue to do what you’re doing.
2:03:53 I hope you continue to add repetitions to your pull-ups.
2:03:57 We will talk again soon.
2:03:59 Thank you so much for being on the show.
2:04:01 – Thank you, Tim.
2:04:02 – Hey, guys, this is Tim again,
2:04:05 just one more thing before you take off.
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2:06:17 I’m packing right now for an international trip.
2:06:20 I tend to be very minimalist
2:06:21 and I’m taking these with me nonetheless.
2:06:24 Now back to the bigger picture.
2:06:26 Olympians, Tour de France winners, Tour de France winners,
2:06:29 the US military and more than 175 college
2:06:32 and professional sports teams
2:06:34 rely on Momentus and their products.
2:06:36 Momentus also partners with some of the best minds
2:06:38 in human performance to bring world-class products to market,
2:06:41 including a few you will recognize from this podcast,
2:06:44 like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrin.
2:06:48 They also work with Dr. Stacy Sims
2:06:50 to assist Momentus in developing products
2:06:52 specifically for women.
2:06:53 Their products contain high-quality ingredients
2:06:55 that are third-party tested,
2:06:56 which in this case means informed sport end or NSF certified.
2:07:00 So you can trust that what is on the label
2:07:02 is in the bottle and nothing else.
2:07:04 And trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition
2:07:06 and supplement world very well,
2:07:08 that is a differentiator that you want
2:07:11 in anything that you consume in this entire sector.
2:07:14 So, good news.
2:07:15 For my non-US listeners, more good news,
2:07:17 not to worry, Momentus ships internationally,
2:07:19 so you have the same access that I do.
2:07:21 So check it out, visit livemomentus.com/tim
2:07:25 and use code TIM to check out for 20% off.
2:07:28 That’s livemomentus, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com/tim
2:07:33 and code TIM for 20% off.
2:07:36 This episode is brought to you by One Password.
2:07:40 I have been using One Password for more than a decade.
2:07:43 It is one of my favorite products.
2:07:46 I met the founding team early on, love those guys
2:07:49 and I have made this product a requirement
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2:07:57 and my feeling is, since that is the case,
2:07:59 you need One Password.
2:08:00 One Password combines industry leading security
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2:08:13 trusted by millions of users
2:08:15 and more than 100,000 businesses from IBM to Slack,
2:08:18 even including my little team.
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2:08:26 One Password lets you securely switch
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2:08:34 All you have to remember is the one strong account password
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2:08:38 Your logins, your credit cards, secure notes
2:08:40 or the Office Wi-Fi password.
2:08:42 One Password creates as many strong, unique passwords
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2:08:49 You can also use it for one-time passwords
2:08:52 where you scan the QR code and it gives you
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2:09:16 Companies suffer from data breaches daily.
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2:09:23 I have personally dealt with a lot of these headaches.
2:09:27 You don’t want them.
2:09:28 It is why using One Password is a business best practice.
2:09:31 I strongly endorse and a business solution
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2:09:35 So check it out.
2:09:36 A free two-week trial at onepassword.com/tim,
2:09:41 that’s one the number one, password.com/tim.
2:09:46 (upbeat music)
2:09:49 [BLANK_AUDIO]